Platonic Coleridge 9781906540067, 9781351194419, 1351194410

Table of contents :
Introduction --
Plato's 'dear gorgeous nonsense' --
Coleridge's Kant: preparer and opponent of Platonism --
The ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy --
Plato in Coleridge's Lectures on the history of philosophy --
Restoring Plato's 'system': the Friend and the Opus maximum --
Conclusion.

Citation preview

Vigus_13mm:177x254 09/10/2008 20:32 Page 1

VIGUS

James Vigus teaches at the Institute for Philosophy, FriedrichSchiller-University, Jena (Germany). His other publications include Coleridge’s Afterlives, ed. by James Vigus and Jane Wright (Palgrave, 2008); he is Reviews Editor of the Coleridge Bulletin.

LEGENDA is a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge. The series STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE is chosen and

edited by the British Comparative Literature Association. It ranges widely across comparative and theoretical topics in literary and translation studies, accommodating research at the interface between different artistic media and between the humanities and the sciences.

PLATONIC COLERIDGE

The ambivalent curiosity of the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) towards Plato — ‘but I love Plato — his dear gorgeous nonsense!’ — soon developed into a philosophical project, and the mature Coleridge proclaimed himself a reviver of Plato’s unwritten or esoteric ‘system’. James Vigus’s study traces Coleridge’s discovery of a Plato marginalised in the universities, and examines his use of German sources on the ‘divine philosopher’, and his Platonic interpretation of Kant’s epistemology. It compares Coleridge’s figurations of poetic inspiration with models in the Platonic dialogues, and investigates to what extent Coleridge’s esoteric ‘system’ of philosophy reflected the Republic’s notorious banishment of poetry.

STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 15

Platonic Coleridge James Vigus

cover illustration: Coleridge’s annotated copy of Thomas Taylor’s translation of Plato, open to the Timaeus; by kind permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

Platonic Coleridge

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published in this series 1. Breeches and Metaphysics: Thackeray’s German Discourse, by S. S. Prawer 2. Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation, by Charlie Louth 3. Aeneas Takes the Metro: The Presence of Virgil in Twentieth-Century French Literature, by Fiona Cox 4. Metaphor and Materiality: German Literature and the World-View of Science 1780–1955, by Peter D. Smith 5. Marguerite Yourcenar: Reading the Visual, by Nigel Saint 6. Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski, translated by Adam Czerniawski and with an introduction by Donald Davie 7. Neither a Borrower: Forging Traditions in French, Chinese and Arabic Poetry, by Richard Serrano 8. The Anatomy of Laughter, edited by Toby Garfitt, Edith McMorran and Jane Taylor 9. Dilettantism and its Values: From Weimar Classicism to the fin de siècle, by Richard Hibbitt 10. The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth Century: In Pursuit of Hesitation, by Claire Whitehead 11. Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece, by Dimitris Papanikolaou 12. Wanderers Across Language: Exile in Irish and Polish Literature of the Twentieth Century, by Kinga Olszewska 13. Moving Scenes: The Aesthetics of German Travel Writing on England 1783–1830, by Alison E. Martin 14. Henry James and the Second Empire, by Angus Wrenn 15. Platonic Coleridge, by James Vigus

Platonic Coleridge ❖ James Vigus

Studies in Comparative Literature 15 Modern HumModern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2009

First published 2009 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

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Contents ❖



Acknowledgements 

ix



A Note on Texts 

x



Introduction

1

1 Plato’s ‘Dear Gorgeous Nonsense’

13

2 Coleridge’s Kant: Preparer and Opponent of Platonism

35

3 The Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy

63

4 Plato in Coleridge’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy

93

5 Restoring Plato’s ‘System’: the Friend and the Opus Maximum

125



Conclusion

167



Bibliography

171



Index

185

for cecilia

Acknowledgements v

This book is a revision of my PhD thesis, completed at Clare College, Cambridge, in 2006. I wish to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my research, including a supplementary grant for a four-month research visit to the Freie Universität, Berlin, which I undertook as an Erasmus student in 2004. I enjoyed further financial support from the Lady Clare Fund (Clare College) and the Tenth Term Completion Award (Faculty of English, Cambridge). I have been extremely fortunate in the advice I have received throughout the long process of research and writing. I want to begin by thanking my doctoral supervisor, Fred Parker, for his meticulous reading and judicious encouragement ever since the early days of my undergraduate degree at Clare. Thanks too to Douglas Hedley, who has shared his knowledge of Coleridge and Platonism with great generosity. He also arranged my visit to Berlin, which proved a turning point in my research. I thank Nigel Leask for stimulating my interest in Coleridge at an early stage, and for two useful advisory meetings. Some of my Romantic education took place at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, where I received helpful feedback from participants in the conferences organized by the late Jonathan Wordsworth. I would like especially to recall the kindness of the late Director of the Wordsworth Trust, Robert Woof. The process of turning the thesis into this book was smoothed by the advice of my examiners, Seamus Perry and Kathleen Wheeler. At Legenda, Elinor Shaffer offered invaluable criticism of a first draft, Graham Nelson guided me painlessly through the process of revision, and the final text benefited greatly from Nigel Hope’s copy-editing. Some of the material on Milton in Chapter 5 first appeared in ‘ “With his garland and his singing robes about him”: The Persistence of the Literary in the Opus Maximum’, in Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion: Essays on the ‘Opus Maximum’, ed. by Jeffrey W. Barbeau (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), pp. 97–119. A few pages of Chapter 1 were first published in the article ‘Did Cole­r idge read Plato by Anticipation?’, Coleridge Bulletin, n.s. 29 (Summer 2007), pp. 65–73. I grate­ fully acknowledge permission to use this material, and thank the Wordsworth Trust for providing the cover image. Several other friends and colleagues have contributed more than they know to this book. Conversations with Jane Wright, as we collaborated on an essay collection entitled Coleridge’s Afterlives, have been a source of many Coleridgean thoughts. Jeff Einboden, Graham Davidson, and Jeff Barbeau have each commented insightfully on sections of my work. The support of Loreta Gandolfi, James Levine, and Josie von Zitzewitz deserves an acknowledgements page to itself. I am grateful for the for­ bearance of my family, and above all my mother’s unflagging encouragement. Finally, I now find it hard to imagine how I could ever have completed this work with­out the sustaining presence of Cecilia Muratori — and the book is dedicated to her.

A Note on Texts v

Coleridge Unless otherwise stated, I quote Coleridge from the following standard editions: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, general editor Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols in 34, Bollingen Series, 75 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971–2002). Henceforth I refer to this edition as CC (Collected Coleridge) The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–71) The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, Merton Christensen and Anthony Harding, 5 vols in 10 (New York, London, and Princeton: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–2002)

When quoting Coleridge’s poetry, I do not give an abbreviation, but refer by line number to Poetical Works, ed. by J. C. C. Mays, 6 vols, 2001 (CC, vol xvi). For the other Coleridge volumes I use the following abbreviations: Aids BL

Aids to Reflection, ed. by John Beer, 1993 (CC, vol. ix) Biographia Literaria, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols, 1983 (CC, vol. vii) CL Collected Letters, full ref. as above CM Marginalia, ed. by George Whalley and H. J. Jackson, 6 vols, 1980–2001 (CC, vol. xii) CN Notebooks, full ref. as above C&S On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. by John Colmer, 1976 (CC, vol. x) Friend The Friend, ed. by Barbara Rooke, 2 vols, 1969 (CC, vol. iv) Lects. 1795 Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. by Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, 1971 (CC, vol. i) LL Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, ed. by R. A. Foakes, 2 vols, 1987 (CC, vol. v) Logic Logic, ed. by J. R. de J. Jackson, 1981 (CC, vol. xiii) LS Lay Sermons, ed. by R. J. White, 1972 (CC, vol. vi): this edition includes The Statesman’s Manual Opus Opus Maximum, ed. by Thomas McFarland with the assistance of Nicholas Halmi, 2002 (CC, vol. xv) Phil. Lects. Lectures 1818–1819 on the History of Philosophy, ed. by J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols, 2000 (CC, vol. viii) SWF Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. by H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols, 1995 (CC, vol. xi) TT Table Talk, ed. by Carl Woodring, 2 vols, 1990 (CC, vol. xiv) Watchman The Watchman, ed. by Lewis Patton, 1970 (CC, vol. ii)

I quote Coleridge’s words exactly as they appear in these editions, with the exception of deleted words, which I omit.

Acknowledgements

xi

When referring without direct quotation to Coleridge’s concepts of Fancy, Imagi­ nation, Reason, Understanding, Idea, and Will, I capitalize the first letter to distinguish these words clearly from their non-technical usages. This is purely a device of convenience, not intended to reflect any particular interpretations of these terms. When citing material from the Notebooks, Marginalia, and Letters, I have included the date (when known) only when it has seemed relevant to my argument. I have also referred to several recent anthologies, as listed in the Bibliography. In my text I cite two of these relatively frequently: S. T. Coleridge: Interviews and Recollections, ed. by Seamus Perry (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000) Perry, Notebooks Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, ed. by Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Classical sources Translations from Plato are, unless otherwise stated, by Coleridge’s contemporary Thomas Taylor (or in the cases of some dialogues, notably Ion and Phaedrus, by Floyer Sydenham). I quote from the recent reprint: The Works of Plato, trans. by Thomas Taylor and Floyer Sydenham, 5 vols (Frome: Prometheus Trust, 1995–96); vols ix–xiii of the Thomas Taylor Series, 33 vols (1994–2006)

These are the translations that appeared in Coleridge’s lifetime, some of which he read, but they are idiosyncratic (see Chapter 1) so I have when necessary substituted modern translations. I follow the Prometheus Trust edition in using the Stephanus pagination when citing Plato (e.g., Republic 657d). The Thomas Taylor Series includes in its other volumes Taylor’s translations from the Neoplatonists, and reference to these volumes is made under the abbreviation TTS. For Plato’s Greek, I have referred in a few instances to the edition used by Coleridge: Platonis philosophi quae exstant; graece ad editionem H. Stephani accurate expressa. Cum M. Ficini interpretatione [. . .], ed. by F. C. Exter and J. V. Embser (Zweibrücken: Studiis Societatis Bipontinae, 1781–87).

Henceforth: Bipont Edition. Accents and breathings are sometimes missing from Greek quotations. This is because, although Coleridge included them in published work, in his notebooks he often transcribed Greek passages from contemporaries, such as Tennemann, who omit them. Further inconsistencies in the use of accents and breathings are probably due to Coleridge’s frequent habit of dictating to amanuenses. German sources Unless otherwise indicated, I quote Kant in German from the texts that Coleridge read. The most frequently quoted of these are referenced using the following abbrev­ iations:

xii

Acknowledgements

Critique of Pure Reason = Critik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd edn (Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1787; facsimile edition: London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1994). References are given to page numbers, always prefaced by ‘B’ to denote the second edition. Critique of the Power of Judgment = Critik der Urtheilskraft, 3rd edn (Berlin: F. T. Lagarde, 1799). References are given to page and paragraph numbers. Vermischte Schriften, ed. by Johann Heinrich Tieftrunk, 4 vols (Halle and Königsberg, 1799– 1807)

English translations of Kant’s Critiques are based on: Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. by Paul Guyer, ed. by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; repr. 2001)

Translations from the essay ‘Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie’ (in vol. iii of Vermischte Schriften) are based on that of Peter Fenves, ed., Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1993). Except in the case of Kant and where otherwise indicated, translations from German are my own. Other Frequent Abbreviations De Quincey, Works = The Works of Thomas De Quincey, general editor Grevel Lindop, 21 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000–03) OED = Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1989 with updates), online at Tennemann = W. G. Tennemann, Geschichte der Philosophie, 11 vols (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1798– 1819)

Introduction v However abstruse, whatever its resort to technical terms or neologism, a philosophical argument belongs to verbal and written discourse. This entails questions of ‘style’. Different philosophies, different philosophers have their differing styles. A metaphysics, an epistemology will have its voice, often immediately recognisable. In turn, there have been among philosophers literary masters. At the outset, ancient Greek thought did not separate the poetic from the philosophical. The poem, as in the case of Parmenides or Empedocles, was a legitimate means of philosophic argument, even of a technical nature. [. . .] Prose came to prevail in philosophy, but often of an inspired and highly personal order. There is scarcely a greater dramatist of reason or, perhaps, dramatist tout court, than Plato. [. . .] In the history of English language literature [. . .] such symbiosis is rarer. English-American literary sensibility is wary of abstraction and of doctrine. It f linches from intellectual technicality or that which ‘has a palpable design upon us’ (where Keats’s warning can serve as a natural definition of moral philosophy). There have been exceptions. George Steiner 1

This book examines the philosophical writing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the light of his relationship to Plato. The title Platonic Coleridge refers in the first instance to the fact that I document, as far as possible, when and via which texts and commentaries Coleridge read Plato, and that I provide a critical account of his explicit comments on ‘the divine philosopher’. At the same time, however, I discuss Platonic Coleridge in a comparative sense, arguing that the form and content of Coleridge’s writing, mainly but not exclusively his later prose, can be usefully inter­preted with reference to Plato’s thought. This dual approach ensures that my readings of Coleridge through a Platonic lens are grounded in the historical detail of Coleridge’s reception of Plato. Coleridge made ambitious claims for himself as a philosopher, above all as a Platonic philosopher. In Biographia Literaria, for instance, he announces his ‘system’ to be ‘no other than the system of Pythagoras and of Plato revived and purified from impure mixtures’.2 As Walter Pater wrote, he claims Plato ‘as the first of his spiritual ancestors’.3 Coleridge repeatedly and without undue modesty linked himself with Plato, praising him in the highest terms as a congenial spirit. But are his invocations of Plato substantial, or instead rhetorical f lourishes which might conceal some ulterior motive? Responses to Coleridge’s self-fashioning as a modern Plato polarized among his contemporaries, and continue to polarize today, into those willing to accept Coleridge’s own expansive claims with little demur, and those who consider them empty or even dishonest. On the one hand, the painter Washington Allston was so impressed by Coleridge’s philosophical discourse that he found himself ‘almost tempted to dream that I have once listened to Plato in

2

Introduction

the groves of the Academy’.4 A visitor to Coleridge during his Highgate years reminisced similarly (in terms which counterbalance Carlyle’s famous portrait of the dismally snuff ling elderly metaphysician): I remember with delight the instruction and pleasure I derived from these discourses, which cannot be better compared than with the dialogues of Plato. The finest loftiest ideas, pouring forth amidst the most blooming poetical phrases, allegories and types, now spiced with Socratic irony, now strengthened by close and all-penetrating argumentation, afforded me an intellectual banquet, nowhere to be met either here or in any part of the continent.5

Coleridge always wrote and talked with an audience in mind, and if his audience drew such comparisons with Plato, he was doubtless delighted. On the other hand, however, contemporary reviewers disdained his Platonic pretensions,6 and even sympathetic readers sometimes became impatient: thus Mary Moody Emerson told her nephew that she thought Coleridge a ‘blockhead’ for placing his intellect on a par with Plato (and Milton).7 This polarity, as I have said, persists today. Pamela Edwards has recently described Coleridge as ‘from first to last, a great classical scholar’, whose Platonic Idealism underpins a consistent and principled approach to political thought.8 Yet the suspicion remains that this kind of conclusion may accept Coleridge’s rhetoric too readily on its own terms. Where is the evidence for Coleridge’s great classical scholarship? Even a thirty-four-volume Collected Coleridge replete with learned annotation has not fully resolved this nagging question. Thomas McFarland, the most robust modern apologist for Coleridge as a philosopher, writes that ‘Coleridge is always indebted, and most of all to Plato and Kant’; but whilst he is thorough on Kant, McFarland emphasizes a little narrowly that Plato was, for Coleridge, ‘eminently a prolegomenon to Christianity’.9 Owing largely to McFarland’s efforts,10 it is no longer the fashion to condemn Coleridge as a plagiarist; but a moderated scepticism lingers, as when Paul Hamilton begins an essay with the open question: ‘Is Coleridge philosophically interesting?’11 More specifically, G. N. G. Orsini insists in his authoritative work Coleridge and German Idealism that ‘it is precisely on Plato that Coleridge is least satisfactory’.12 Orsini, though broadly sympathetic to Coleridge, feels that he lacks any clear historical sense, especially of Plato, whom he confuses (thinks Orsini) with Kant and the post-Kantians.13 The disjunction between these assessments seems in part a legacy of the old plagiarism debate: Coleridge criticism has long consisted mainly of attack and defence, and the defence has often emphasized the rich tapestry of Coleridge’s intellectual background, in order to exonerate him from accusations that he was a parroter of Schelling, or a misreader of Kant, or an inadequate peddler of philosophical fragments. Thus there is an abundance of synthesizing studies of influences on Coleridge — but these can often leave the impression that Coleridge was a kind of sponge,14 more or less adequately soaking up others’ thought. Of course, a distinguished sequence of critics has fruitfully taken this tack, from John H. Muirhead through Owen Barfield to Mary Anne Perkins, not to mention McFarland.15 The danger, however, is that (as Neil Vickers observes), ‘Coleridge scholarship is full of researchers working on some unfamiliar body of knowledge which they then

Introduction

3

hold up as the mould from which the pattern of Coleridge’s evolution as a poet or thinker was taken’.16 The proliferation of such studies has led to a situation in which Hamilton writes of ‘the disastrous figure of Coleridge, that desperate housingproblem for both English criticism and the continental tradition of philosophy he plagiarized’.17 The old charge of plagiarism returns in this characterization, in an imprecise form (is it possible to plagiarize a tradition?); and the puzzle about Coleridge’s Plato and Coleridge’s Platonism is no closer to elucidation. In what follows, I contest Orsini’s judgement that Coleridge is ‘least satisfactory’ on Plato. In so doing I answer Hamilton’s question whether Coleridge is ‘philosophically interesting’: yes, and routine references to his confusion or unoriginality must be examined very carefully indeed. Rather than attempt a McFarland-like defence of Coleridge’s erudition, however, I subordinate the question of influences on Coleridge. Instead my study is a comparison of ideas, though grounded at every point in an investigation of Coleridge’s own reading and criticism of Plato. By avoiding the two critical extremes — dismissing Coleridge as unoriginal or ‘not a philosopher’, or else maintaining his rigour at every point — I hope to illuminate important aspects of both the form and content of his work. Further, I answer the question ‘why Plato?’, putting Coleridge’s Platonism in the context of contemporary English discussions of Plato and Socrates, as well as — crucially — the post-Kantian revival of interest in the ‘philosophical artist’. I want to suggest here how each of my following five chapters may be seen as responding to one of the major critical suspicions regarding Coleridge’s relationship to Plato. (i) It is sometimes felt that Coleridge’s ambitious invocations of Plato might even conceal a certain ignorance of the dialogues. On his own account, he studied various Neoplatonists first, and Plato only later, and his references to Plato tend to be relatively unspecific. In Chapter 1, I set Coleridge’s earlier encounters with Plato in historical context, considering the lack of interest in Plato in the universities, the Dissenters’ portrayal of him as a mystificatory proto-Trinitarian who had perverted the admirable moral teaching of Socrates, and the peculiar translations of Thomas Taylor. I then analyse Coleridge’s own critical mythology, drawing out what he meant by having read Plato ‘by anticipation’. It is true that Coleridge emphasized the priority of Platonism in his intellectual development partly in order to play down his debt to the German philosophers. However, without claiming that Coleridge was a great philologist, I show how his intuitive sympathy with Plato, remarkable at that time, manifested itself through comments on anamnesis. I argue that Coleridge considered the attempt to distinguish Plato from the later Neoplatonists of great importance. (ii) Coleridge sometimes appears to confuse Plato with Kant. When Coleridge’s comments on Plato are not taken seriously, it is often because critics assume — with some reason — that the name of Plato is merely invoked to disguise the extent of Coleridge’s engagement with and borrowing from modern German thought. My second chapter analyses Coleridge’s reception of Kant, since Coleridge does indeed treat Plato and Kant as symbiotic. Again I contextualize this reception, detailing

4

Introduction

the unfavourable conditions which any attempt to mediate Kantian thought encountered in England at the turn of the century. These conditions, I argue, partly account for Coleridge’s notorious indirectness in his metaphysical writing: he constantly struggled with the problem of how to communicate Truth to an audience unprepared to receive it. Most importantly, however, Coleridge regarded Plato and Kant as united on most philosophical questions, but as differing on the ‘highest’ question of philosophy: whether the Ideas are regulative or constitutive. I suggest that although he was strongly conscious of Kant’s disapproval of the ‘exaggerated’ language of Platonic discourse, he developed what he recognized as Kantian hints in order to challenge the boundaries the German philosopher set on human knowledge. (iii) Many critics question whether Coleridge really contributed to ‘philosophy’ at all. The implication of this doubt is twofold: Coleridge’s thought is presented too unsystematically; and his language is that of a poet, lacking the proper rigour of (notably) Kant. In Chapter 3 I address the latter point. I argue that the tension between poetry and philosophy is in fact significantly registered in Coleridge’s writing; and that this tension can be traced back to the Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy instituted by Plato himself in the Republic. Plato offers two essentially negative models for poetic production: mimesis and inspiration. Coleridge employs both these models in his own criticism, and shares the Platonic anxiety that poetic language may be sub-philosophical. I see these issues as complexly embodied in the poem ‘Kubla Khan’ and its later preface, in which Coleridge celebrates inspiration, yet betrays anxiety about its irrational provenance and uncertain value. (iv) It is often felt that Coleridge co-opts Plato to his own polemic because of a lack of historical sense. Thus Alan P. R. Gregory argues that in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Coleridge indulged in ‘the anachronistic conformation of ancient philosophy to contemporary controversial needs’.18 Coleridge’s historical sense was undoubtedly different from ours, but I argue in Chapter 4 for the cogency of the Lectures. Lecture Four on Plato is pivotal in this series, and I describe how Plato was central to Coleridge’s vision of the circular movement of philosophical history. I discuss both his borrowings and dissension from the German historian W. G. Tennemann in detail. In particular, Coleridge accepted Tennemann’s view that Plato held two sets of doctrines: exoteric and esoteric. I suggest that this is a useful model for considering Coleridge’s own practice: in parallel with the ‘exoteric’ public lectures, for instance, are Coleridge’s ‘esoteric’ marginalia to Tennemann, which take the problems of moral purification and the nature of Ideas to a deeper level. Finally, I discuss Coleridge’s hints as to how it might be possible to regain access to the secret teaching of Plato. (v) Returning to a point made under (ii) above, Coleridge is often thought to be disqualified from the status of ‘philosopher’ by his fragmentary output. In particular, he failed to fulfil so many promises: what happened to the ‘transcendental deduction’ of the faculty of Imagination he promised in the thirteenth chapter of the Biographia? However, in the wake of the publication of all Coleridge’s texts, including the elusive Opus Maximum, a full reassessment is underway, in which the extent of Coleridge’s

Introduction

5

achievement is finally being recognized.19 My fifth chapter aims to contribute to this reassessment. I employ the esoteric–exoteric distinction again, discussing the Essays on Method in The Friend (exoteric, published) alongside the Opus Maximum (esoteric, dictated to a few Coleridgean initiates). In the Essays on Method, Coleridge invokes Plato’s authority by way of truncating his investigation into the ‘ground’ of philosophical method. In the Opus Maximum, however, Coleridge is no longer anxious about the need to communicate with a popular audience, and attempts a full investigation into that ‘ground’, which he defines as Will. The Idea of Will and the origin of evil, topics which Coleridge eschews when writing exoterically, are convincingly treated in the esoteric work. A final point is that in the lexically labyrinthine Opus Maximum ‘philosophy’ might seem to have banished ‘poetry’ — but I show how this picture is complicated by some allusions to Milton. I suggest in this way that the philosophical Lectures and the Opus Maximum deserve more attention than they normally receive from readers with a primarily literary interest in Coleridge; and conversely that where Coleridge is often considered to be confusing different discourses, we might better see his writing precisely as registering productive anxiety or challenge to boundaries such as that so often erected between poetry and philosophy. *

*

*

In the foregoing summary I have introduced three concepts that will intertwine throughout the book: the esoteric–exoteric distinction; the anxiety of reception (to borrow Lucy Newlyn’s helpful term);20 and the Ancient Quarrel between poetry and philosophy. I should clarify further how these concepts inform a comparison between Coleridge and Plato. The notion that Plato in some sense had an esoteric philosophy is well attested, and endorsed by many recent critics of Plato. According to the Seventh Letter, the most important aspects of his philosophy remained unwritten: this is consistent with the enforcement of the superiority of the spoken word over the written in Phaedrus. Aristotle, too, testifies to Plato’s maintaining unwritten doctrines. Such evidence coincides with many readers’ sense of something undeclared in Plato’s dialogues: some mysterious kernel beyond what Coleridge called the poetic drapery. Coleridge speculated interestedly about the esoteric doctrines of Plato, partly because this notion harmonized with his own practice. Among Coleridge’s contem­ poraries, it was the philosophically erudite commentator Henry Crabb Robinson who recognized that he was consciously reviving the ancient distinction between the esoteric and exoteric; discussing the mixture of philosophical depth with popular religion in Aids to Reflection, Robinson noted that this work was an exception in that Coleridge ‘was not unwilling in one publication to write both esoterically & exoterically’.21 In most of his publications, Coleridge’s prose abundantly generates a sense of the esoteric, through ruptures in argument, abrupt silences, and quotations of poetry where argument is awaited. Coleridge was reluctant to publish his work, often cripplingly so, in part owing to a belief that certain material should be withheld from the public. During the Highgate years he wrote and spoke extensively on philosophy to an exclusive inner circle.

6

Introduction

A further similarity between the writings of Coleridge and Plato is that they so foreground their literary form that neither can be reduced to a complete system without a fatal desiccation. This is all too well indicated by the lifelessness of systematizations by two of Coleridge’s contemporaries: Tennemann’s System der Platonischen Philosophie and J. H. Green’s Spiritual Philosophy: Founded on the Teaching of the Late S. T. Coleridge. Rather than relentlessly systematize the fragments, we might consider why a philosopher should maintain esoteric doctrines, or give the impression of doing so, or both. I suggest two overlapping reasons. The first is the anxiety of reception. Anxiety of reception is caused by the possibility of political reprisals against authors of certain types of writing; by the threat of hostile reviews; or by the belief that most readers are unqualified or unworthy to receive the material. All three of these conditions apply to Coleridge, and all except fear of reviewers to Plato. Coleridge himself, with an eye on his own situation as mediator and interpreter of Platonic philosophy, discusses the reasons for Plato’s esoterica in precisely these terms. The second reason I suggest for maintaining esoterica (or appearing to do so) consists in a belief about the objects of philosophy. Key to the idealisms of both Plato (in many dialogues) and Coleridge (in his later prose) is the conviction that Ideas actively shape our mind, and that through Reason or Imagination we can attain direct intuition of the Ideas. If this is the case, our inner world is not constituted by language alone. In the highest activity of philosophy (which in the Opus Maximum Coleridge concurs with Plato in naming dialectic), words should convey their own inadequacy, dissolving to enable the activity of direct intuition. This conviction precludes systematic writing, in the sense that a static edifice of propositions automatically claims for itself an adequacy to reality which Plato and Coleridge deny. If language is to point beyond itself in this way, however, it must be a kind of language that is not committed to its own denotational and logical adequacy to its objects; and of such language one salient form is poetic. It is poetic philosophy that appears to leave things unsaid, and so offers a tantalizing sense of esoteric doctrines lying beyond the text. The poetic element of idealist philosophy is not lightly achieved, however. ‘To poeticize philosophy and to philosophize poetry — such was the highest aim of all romantic thinkers’, declared Ernst Cassirer;22 and those English and German Romantics who pursued this aim, including Coleridge, often looked naturally to Plato as a precedent or model. Nevertheless, a contrary model loomed larger still: Kant, who in an essay of 1796 attacked contemporary poetic, platonizing philo­sophers as merely decking out their presumptuous, ungrounded assertions. ‘Philosophy is fundamentally prosaic’, insisted Kant, who pointed to Plato as the originator of this vain tendency in philosophical writing. This censure is consistent with the restriction Kant places on speculative Reason. Unlike Coleridge and much of Plato, Kant denies that human Reason can have access to the noumenal realm. That being so, the kind of poetic language which aims to convey the experience of contact with Ideas can only ever be decorative rather than insightful; in Coleridgean terms, fanciful rather than imaginative. This makes it opposed to the serious business of philosophy. For Kant, poetry is an enemy of philosophy when it encroaches on philosophical territory.

Introduction

7

Yet what is so interesting about the poetic language of both Plato and Coleridge is that, in some of their writings, both approach this Kantian view. It is Plato who in The Republic has Socrates describe an Ancient Quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Socrates banishes the poets from the ideal republic because poetry is irrational and hence unphilosophical; poets copy the sensible world, which itself is only a copy of the Ideas. Poetry being thus at two removes from the Ideas, it can have no role in philosophical discourse, and those who copy the actions glorified by poets are entirely irrational. Coleridge too was alarmed by mimetic art, believing that it dulled the critical faculties of readers and audiences. Nevertheless for Plato and Coleridge there remains an alternative, ‘good’ kind of figurative discourse, whose possibility is held open by Plato’s use of myths, Socrates’ daemonic intuitions, or Coleridge’s appreciation of the poetic Imagination. This notion of ‘poetic’ cognition is readily figured or understood as ‘inspiration’, as explored by Socrates in Phaedrus and Coleridge in ‘Kubla Khan’. If inspired poetry is thought of as imitating the Ideas rather than copying the sensible world, it might be denoted philosophical. And yet it is difficult to be certain about the source of inspiration, and Plato and Coleridge both treat the experience with a degree of ironic detachment, thus differentiating themselves from enthusiastic mysticism. Linked to this, both Plato and Coleridge often appear in agreement with Kant’s conviction that philosophy ought to be systematic, and therefore unpoetic. My final chapter reads The Friend and the Opus Maximum as struggling productively with these problems. *

*

*

In these readings I move in a different direction from some other recent studies that have accepted the importance of Plato to Coleridge, notably those of Eric G. Wilson and Mary Anne Perkins. Wilson casts Plato as a villain in Coleridge’s development.23 Apparently unconsciously echoing an old argument of Stephen Potter’s,24 Wilson suggests that Coleridge inhabits two worlds: the lively, green world of poetry; and the static, grey world of metaphysics, the latter presided over by Plato. As long as Coleridge remained open-minded and willing to inhabit the authentic ‘limbo’ of f luctuating, temporal human experience, his poetic genius f lourished. But he succumbed to a craving for the Platonic certainties of eternity and rationality: ‘he murders energy and loves form’, thus killing off his own creativity (shooting his albatross, perhaps). In Wilson’s opinion, although Plato’s early work was commendably open-ended, later Plato wrote ‘pseudo-dialectic’, which has unfortunately persisted in Western thought. In pseudo-dialectic, the semblance of investigation is merely a mask for the purpose of asserting the life-negating doctrine of Ideas and denying the reality of our everyday world. That this is an oversimplification is evident, for instance, from the fact that the late dialogue Parmenides appears to critique the theory of Ideas, and ends with a conclusion in which nothing is concluded.25 Plato, as in fact Coleridge understood, does not fit this — or indeed any — paradigm so neatly. Yet Wilson is able to amass considerable support for his one-sided construction of Plato as a deplorable, authoritarian metaphysician, from Nietzsche to Isaiah Berlin. Wilson’s argument had, though, effectively already been answered by Perkins’s

8

Introduction

article ‘Coleridge and the “Other Plato” ’.26 Perkins highlights the parallel between postmodern deconstructions of Plato and those of Coleridge. Both are based, she points out, on prior constructions of the two writers as conservative in the worst sense, propagating empty metaphysics to denigrate corporeality and suppress con­ crete efforts at social reform. Coleridge’s Platonism is sometimes seized upon as the root of ‘authoritarian cultural politics’;27 or (as in Wilson’s work) blamed for the decay of his poetic sensibility. Such views are founded, as Perkins notes, on the fact that [i]mplicit within the tradition of Anglo-American philosophy since the Enlightenment is the axiom that ideas are opposed to reality. This makes it impossible to consider an ‘ideal Realism’ as anything but pure contradiction. Ideas have gradually been assumed as ‘unreal’ or ‘other worldly’. They may be images, objects, pictures — sense-dependent but inferior to the reality which they represent.28

This of course was the Lockean tendency Coleridge laboured to resist — especially in his campaign against ‘the despotism of the eye’, as I discuss later — and he told his lecture-audience that the greatest art has been produced under Platonist worldviews. In opposition to the postmodern construction of Plato, Perkins cites a recent call for a return to the ‘other Plato’29 — the artist, the defender of dialogue which resists closure. According to Perkins, we can rediscover the ‘other Coleridge’, a creature of openness and inquiry, simultaneously with the ‘other Plato’. Valuable though this approach is in correcting a prevalent bias, though, it does not tell the whole story, since it replaces one modern construction of Plato with another. From Coleridge’s perspective there is no straightforward dichotomy between Plato as poet (artistic, open, dialogue-writing, hero) and Plato as metaphysician (logical, closed, system-building, villain). The two are admittedly distinct in Coleridge’s presentation, but they co-exist: he regards the former Plato as exoteric, the latter as esoteric. He considered that ‘the writings of Plato [. . . are] poetry of the highest kind’, but also that ‘it would be in the highest degree presumptuous to affirm anything positively of the Platonic System as there is too much Reason to fear that we do not possess the Key to its Nomenclature’.30 Coleridge implies that Plato’s esoteric system itself, however, was crucially informed by a turn to the sublime, communicated through art. This esoteric–exoteric distinction including an esoteric turn to art is mirrored, often consciously, in Coleridge’s own major prose.31 Meanwhile I agree with Wilson insofar as he detects a tension between poetic and philosophical writing in Coleridge, and his reference of this to Plato. Rather than blaming Coleridge’s Platonism for his supposed loss of creativity, however, I construe the tension in terms of the Ancient Quarrel between poetry and philosophy, which Socrates elucidated and which continued productively to trouble Coleridge. Like David Jasper, then, I avoid the artificial separation of Coleridge’s philosophical from his literary pursuits;32 but whereas Jasper traces ‘in Coleridge’s writings his endeavours to perceive the nature of divine revelation in his experience of poetic inspiration and creativity’,33 I tend to find tension rather than harmony. I have mentioned the traditional adversarial–defensive polarity in Coleridge studies, but a decade ago, Seamus Perry’s book Coleridge and the Uses of Division moved

Introduction

9

the discussion to a new level. Perry demonstrates that a critical appreciation need not attempt to smooth out Coleridge’s ‘double-mindedness’ and contradictoriness, but can even see it as ‘a kind of enabling inconsistency’.34 Since then, several books have explored the philosophical dimensions of Coleridge’s writing more thoroughly than ever before. I have already referred to Perkins and Gregory, and most recently some distinguished work has appeared on the German context of Coleridge’s thought: Reid’s exploration of concepts of form and symbol, Hamilton’s subtle study of Coleridge among the post-Kantians, and Berkeley’s authoritative treatment of Coleridge in relation to Spinozism and the Pantheism Controversy precipitated by Friedrich Jacobi.35 I regret having read Berkeley’s book too late to absorb it fully into my argument, since it contains penetrating discussions of the concepts of Reason and Will, which I address especially in the final chapter of the present book. Since Berkeley leaves Plato(nism) out of account, however, his work complements rather than conf licting with my own. A recent work of great importance to my argument is Douglas Hedley’s study of the Christian Platonism of Aids to Reflection. I restrict my discussion to the works Coleridge wrote before the publication of Aids (1825), but I attempt to follow Hedley’s lead in several respects, especially with regard to Coleridge’s relationship to his German contemporaries. As he argues, ‘the great revival of Platonism in Germany in the eighteenth century was ushered in by Kant’.36 However, in defining Coleridge’s Platonism, writes Hedley, it is necessary to put his thinking into the context where the English universities still demanded subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, the first being the doctrine of the Trinity, and where thinkers such as Priestley were arguing that the doctrine constitutes a non-biblical ‘corruption’ smuggled into Christianity by Platonizing Church Fathers. Hence the ‘Platonism’ at stake is not that of Plato’s dialogues, or the ‘unwritten doctrines’ of the Academy, but the allegorising metaphysics of Middle and Neoplatonism which, indeed, formed such a crucial component of Christian theology, and the stream of ‘Christian Platonism’ which was so potent in the early modern period in Florence and Cambridge.37

The tradition Hedley outlines is indeed central to Coleridge, and I discuss Coleridge’s Platonic Trinity in Chapters 1 and 5. Nevertheless, my approach differs from Hedley’s in emphasizing precisely the Platonic dialogues and unwritten doctrines. One aspect of Coleridge’s Platonism was his desire to strip away the accretions of centuries, and return ad fontes, which required him to consider (even though he could not resolve) the question of which sources for Plato’s philosophy were most reliable. Reconstructing Coleridge’s views of Plato himself (not of Plotinus, Ficino, the Cambridge Platonists, and so on, important though those philosophers were as lenses on the ‘divine Plato’) enables me to compare Coleridge’s own struggle to mediate an idealist philosophy exoterically and esoterically. I speculate further that Coleridge may even have learned to divide his own work into esoteric and exoteric from his readings of Plato. The second healthy tendency in recent Coleridge criticism is that of treating him as a mediator of ideas, exemplified by Daniel Sanjiv Roberts and Lucy Newlyn.38 This is a useful step away from influences on Coleridge. Platonic Coleridge always

10

Introduction

has a palpable design on readers. He regarded Plato as ‘essentially a teacher’, and sought to fashion himself in the image of Plato. ‘To Coleridge [. . .] I owe education’, wrote Sterling39 — probably the most gratifying compliment it was possible to pay him. But Coleridge’s relationship with his audiences was notoriously uneasy, and the phrase of Newlyn’s I have used already — ‘anxiety of reception’ — is perfectly apt. Newlyn highlights the irritating quality of Coleridge’s prose that results from his fear about readers’ reactions. However, she betrays anti-Coleridgean assumptions in certain elisions: presenting, for instance, the ‘elitist defensiveness’ of Coleridge’s prose as lying in ‘the philosophical density and obscurantism of its lexical content’.40 The easy alignment of ‘philosophical’ with ‘obscurantism’ neglects Coleridge’s own distinction between obscurity as an author’s fault, and obscurity inherent in the subject. This prejudice is symbolized by the front-cover image of Newlyn’s book: Beerbohm’s cartoon of the slumped figure of Coleridge table-talking, while the guests yawn. Certainly some contemporaries found Coleridge’s monologues in table-talk or in print abstruse and boring. But a significant group felt that they could not read, or hear, enough — Sterling, for instance, J. H. Green, and the abovequoted de’ Prati. Whether it is a blessing or a curse to be buttonholed by the Ancient Mariner depends on the character of the Wedding Guest. Hence my insistence on the distinction between the works Coleridge directed to a ‘promiscuous public’, which caused him anxiety and so generated the reader-baiting devices detailed by Newlyn, and the works addressed to the inner circle of Coleridgean initiates such as Green. In many ways, the latter, ‘esoteric’ work is more satisfying for the twentyfirst-century reader who is privileged to compare and choose. Through the esoteric–exoteric distinction which Coleridge applied to Plato, then, I aim to bring together the two critical trends just outlined — to treat Coleridge’s philosophy seriously, but without losing sight of its determination by the anxiety of reception. The following chapters have a loosely chronological shape: I range across various texts in Chapters 1 and 2 (on his reception of Plato and Kant), beginning from the 1790s and lingering on such works as ‘Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism’ (1814); in Chapter 3 I refer mainly to Biographia Literaria (published 1817), the Lectures on Literature, ‘On Poesy or Art’, and ‘Kubla Khan’ in its published form (1816); and Chapters 4 and 5 treat a cluster of later works in detail: the 1818 Friend, the 1819 Philosophical Lectures, and the Opus Maximum (conjecturally dated 1820–23). The roughly chronological shape of this book enables me to emphasize the extent to which the Opus Maximum gathers and attempts to resolve so much of Coleridge’s previous Platonic thought. Thus Plato’s doctrine of Ideas, to which I refer in every previous chapter, first appears in its full Coleridgean colouring in Chapter 5. Platonic Coleridge is a topic that deserves to be pursued further, through Aids to Reflection (1825), ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’ (1825), On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829), and the recently published fifth volume of the Notebooks. However, those inescapable preconditions of human experience, time and space, have placed their own restrictions on this study, and to avoid diffuseness I refer only minimally to material after around 1823, when most of Coleridge’s writing becomes explicitly theological.

Introduction

11

Notes to the Introduction 1. Introduction to Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter Conradi (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. ix–x. 2. BL I, 263. 3. ‘Coleridge’, in Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1913; first published 1889), p. 69. 4. The Life and Letters of Washington Allston, ed. by Jared B. Flagg (London: Bentley, 1893), p. 64; reprinted in Coleridge: Interviews, p. 102. 5. Gioacchino de’ Prati, ‘Autobiography’, quoted in M. H. Fisch, ‘The Coleridges, Dr. Prati, and Vico’, Modern Philology, 41.2 (November 1943), 111–22 (p. 121). Contrast Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling, ed. by W. Hale White (London: Oxford University Press, 1933; first published 1851), pp. 55–64. 6. See e.g. Hazlitt’s review of The Statesman’s Manual: Edinburgh Review, 27 (December 1816), 444– 59; reprinted in Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. by J. R. de J. Jackson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), I, 262–77 (p. 264). 7. Letter of October 1829, cited in Laura Dassow Walls, ‘Ralph Waldo Emerson and Coleridge’s American Legacy’, in Coleridge’s Afterlives, ed. by James Vigus and Jane Wright (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 112–27, pp. 113–14. 8. Pamela Edwards, The Statesman’s Science: History, Nature, and Law in the Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 3. 9. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 44, 207. 10. See especially Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, pp. 1–52. 11. ‘The Philosopher’, in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 170–86 (p. 170). Cf. Hans Werner Breunig, Verstand und Einbildungskraft in der englischen Romantik: S. T. Coleridge als Kulminationspunkt seiner Zeit (Münster: Lit, 2002), pp. 6–7: ‘Ob Coleridge Philosoph war oder nicht, ist vielleicht nicht so leicht zu entscheiden’ [Whether Coleridge was a philosopher or not, is perhaps not so easy to decide]. 12. Coleridge and German Idealism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), p. vii — henceforth: Orsini. 13. Orsini, p. 52. 14. ‘Sponges: persons who absorbed what they read and returned it nearly in the same state only a little dirtied’ (LL I, 203). 15. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London: Macmillan, 1930); Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 16. Coleridge and the Doctors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 9. 17. Hamilton, Metaromanticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 6. 18. Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003), p. 118. 19. See esp. Jeffrey W. Barbeau, ed., Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion: Essays on the ‘Opus Maximum’ (Louvain: Peeters, 2006). 20. Newlyn, Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). On ‘Coleridge’s Anxiety’ as in general a determining feature of his psychology, see McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 104–36. Coleridge himself confessed to ‘the anxiety of authorship’: BL I, 233. 21. Robinson, review of The Statesman’s Manual, Critical Review ( January 1817), V, 42–48, repr. in Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. by J. R. de J. Jackson, vol. i (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 278–84 (p. 279). 22. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962; first published 1944), p. 156. 23. Coleridge’s Melancholia (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2004). 24. Coleridge and S.T.C. (London: Cape, 1935). 25. Gilbert Ryle, Plato’s Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) banishes the spectre of the monolithic Plato that haunts Wilson.

12

Introduction

26. European Romantic Review, 8.1 (Winter 1997), 25–40. 27. Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 4. The politics of Coleridge’s idealism is a large topic that I barely broach in this book, and on which Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, intro. F. R. Leavis (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950; reprinted 1980) remains a key evaluation. I feel that attacks on Coleridge’s thought as ‘romantic ideology’ have now been challenged sufficiently strongly that I need not devote space to this matter: see e.g. Seamus Perry, ‘Coleridge, the Return to Nature, and the New AntiRomanticism: An Essay in Polemic’, Romanticism on the Net, 4 (November 1996), [accessed 7 June 2008]. 28. Perkins, p. 34. For Coleridge on ideal realism, see BL I, 260–63. 29. From Richard Bernstein, in The New Constellation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 49–50, who commends John Dewey’s ‘Back to Plato’ movement. 30. SWF I, 140. Coleridge continues: ‘the Works of Plato like the sacred Books of the East keep us in continual doubt what is to be understood literally & what figuratively or allegorically’. 31. I touch at various stages on the psychology of the Romantic sublime, but for a fuller treatment see David Vallins, Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism: Feeling and Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). 32. Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985). As Jasper notes, this separation is pressed too far by David Pym, The Religious Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1978) and to a lesser extent James Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). 33. Jasper, p. 144. 34. Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 3 — henceforth: Perry, Division. 35. Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy; Gregory, Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination; Nicholas Reid, Coleridge, Form and Symbol: or, the Ascertaining Vision (Sevenoaks: Ashgate, 2005); Paul Hamilton, Coleridge and German Philosophy: The Poet in the Land of Logic (London: Continuum, 2007); Richard Berkeley, Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). 36. Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: ‘Aids to Reflection’ and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 4. 37. Hedley, pp. 6–7. 38. Roberts, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and the High Romantic Argument (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000); Newlyn, as above. 39. Letter to J. C. Hare, first published in Essays and Tales (1848), quoted in C. R. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942), p. 136; cf. Aids, p. cxiv. 40. Newlyn, p. 86.

Chapter 1

v

Plato’s ‘Dear Gorgeous Nonsense’ The ‘Wild-minded Disciple of Socrates’ Coleridge’s Platonic self-fashioning began early, if rather tentatively, with expressions of affection towards the ancient philosopher. Defining ‘Life’ in a letter to John Thelwall of 1796, he writes: ‘Plato says, it is Harmony — he might as well have said, a fiddle stick’s end — but I love Plato — his dear gorgeous nonsense!’1 This might not have surprised Thelwall, for only a couple of months previously Coleridge had told him: ‘Metaphysics, & Poetry, & “Facts of mind” — (i.e. Accounts of all the strange phantasms that ever possessed your philosophy-dreamers from Tauth, the Egyptian to Taylor, the English Pagan,) are my darling Studies’.2 This latter comment prefaces Coleridge’s sonnet ref lecting on the birth of his son Hartley, which includes the line ‘and Some have said | We liv’d ere yet this fleshly robe we wore’ accompanied by the note: ‘Alluding to Plato’s doc[trine] of Pre-existence’; so is clear that Plato figures prominently among Coleridge’s ‘philosophy-dreamers’. Taken together, these comments seem to ref lect a considerable though as yet barely developed interest in Plato. Coleridge’s tone is noteworthy: at once playful and unmistakably defensive. While confessing with apparent self-deprecation his irrational affection for a philosopher and a philosophy nonsensical and dreamy, he cautiously distances himself with scientific credentials: really he is only investigating psychological curiosities, ‘facts of mind’. To some extent this tone is typical of Coleridge’s correspondence with Thelwall in particular. It ref lects, that is, a combination of discomfort with the latter’s atheism, desire to retain the respect of the fiercely rational thinker, and enjoyment of ‘sparring’ on contentious topics.3 But it also accords with the fact that Coleridge’s budding sympathy for Plato was culturally eccentric. The eighteenth century had been a relatively barren period for Platonic studies. By around 1796 there seems to have been very little study of Plato in Britain, while what interest there was tended to exist among Dissenters, generally hostile to what they perceived as the mystificatory effects of Platonism. That is not to deny the existence of a rich tradition of what might be termed ‘indirect’ Platonism in the eighteenth century, which had considerable impact on Coleridge. To the prominent names of Shaftesbury, Berkeley in his later work, Gray, and Akenside, can be added James Harris, Lord Monboddo, and Richard Price as (in various ways) promoters of Platonism known to Coleridge.4 However,

14

Dear Gorgeous Nonsense

my concern here is with direct Platonism, since (as I will show) in Coleridge’s time there was a new impulse to return ad fontes, to distinguish Plato’s works from the subsequent Neoplatonic tradition. Not that Plato’s works themselves were entirely neglected in the eighteenth century. Floyer Sydenham’s labours as a translator of Plato (ignored in his day) were advanced and completed in Coleridge’s time by Thomas Taylor, an important figure whom I discuss below. Moreover, Plato scholarship developed in the form of several new editions.5 There is firm evidence, nevertheless, that universities and readers in general paid Plato very little attention.6 As late as 1834, John Stuart Mill published a series of abstracts of some of Plato’s dialogues, asserting this to be necessary because ‘of all the great writers of antiquity, there is scarcely one who, in this country at least, is not merely so little understood, but so little read’. Mill complains bitterly of the neglect of Plato at Oxford and Cambridge, concluding: ‘there are, probably, in this kingdom, not so many as a hundred persons who have read Plato, and not so many as twenty who ever do’.7 Mill himself was exceptional in having begun to read Plato at the age of seven, under the tuition of his father who, as a student of theology in Edinburgh in 1795, had undertaken a determined and solitary struggle through an almost unreadably cramped edition of Plato in Greek.8 Thomas Love Peacock adds his testimony to this academic neglect: ‘[I]n our Universities,’ declares Dr. Folliot in Crotchet Castle (1818), Plato is held to be little better than a misleader of youth, and they have shown their contempt for him, not only by never reading him (a mode of contempt in which they deal very largely), but even by never publishing a complete edition of him.9

Indeed, in Cambridge during the undergraduate years of Coleridge (1791–94) and Wordsworth (1787–91) and beyond, with Newton’s Principia and Locke’s Essay two of the most important texts, there was little enthusiasm for Platonic pursuits. In his book Wordsworth’s Cambridge Education, Ben Ross Schneider notes that the names of Plato, Plotinus, the Cambridge Platonists, and so on are ‘conspicuously absent from materials dealing with Wordsworth’s Cambridge’.10 George Dyer could not recall any lectures on Plato during his time at Cambridge (he took his BA in 1778);11 while Coleridge reported about ‘Classical Lectures’ in general that ‘They are seldom given, and when given, very thinly attended’.12 Plato seems never to have been set reading. Thomas Taylor’s translations of Plato (1793 onwards) gained anything but a warm reception from academics.13 A reminiscence of Charles Le Grice notes Coleridge’s reading of Plato in Greek at Cambridge, but by way of suggesting that this was an unusual activity: ‘What evenings have I spent in [Coleridge’s] rooms! [. . .] when Æschylus, and Plato, and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons, &c. to discuss the pamphlets of the day’.14 For comparison, there was only a little more Platonic activity at Oxford: there were no lectures on Plato until the 1820s, and he did not appear in the set papers of the Literae Humaniores of Oxford Honours Schools until 1847; although Forster’s edition of five dialogues of Plato (Oxford, 1745) appears as part of the term reading for students at Magdalen College at the end of the eighteenth century.15 It is striking that Shelley, the future translator of Symposium and Ion, was limited at Oxford to

Dear Gorgeous Nonsense

15

autodidactic reading of a most unreliable translation. As T. J. Hogg, his Platoreading companion, related: ‘It seems laughable, but it is true, that our knowledge of Plato was derived solely from Dacier’s translation of a few of the dialogues, and from an English version of that French translation; we had never attempted a single sentence in the Greek’.16 In 1821 Hogg, who presents himself as having continued to inf luence Shelley’s study of Plato, attributed the universities’ indifference to a kind of intellectual corruption. He wrote to Shelley recommending him to read Gorgias, which ought to be translated and published with notes; [. . .] Plato is unfortunately little read, even by scholars, which is much to be regretted [. . .] That he should be shunned at Universities is natural enough, for reasons which he himself gives in the dialogue in question. I know no book more adapted to kindle a light in the minds of young persons incompatible with the darkness that now overshadows the earth.17

This hints at a certain radical potential in Plato’s texts, which probably also appealed to Coleridge. The young firebrand Southey, shortly before meeting Coleridge and planning Pantisocracy, had written excitedly about ‘Platonopolis’, the plan of Plotinus to set up a city as close as possible to the Republic.18 Plato was so far from institutional centrality that, for reformist thinkers, his work may even have held the attraction of the forbidden. However, when Peacock mentions the opinion in the Universities that Plato is a ‘misleader of youth’, he alludes to the Symposium and therefore to a cultural problem which affected even the most open-minded readers of Plato in the nineteenth century: homosexuality, especially in the form of pederasty.19 When Shelley trans­ lated the Symposium he did not initially plan to publish it, since he refused to edit the sections that would be sure to offend English readers. Perceiving that contemporary attitudes to homosexuality obstructed sympathetic understanding of the Greeks, Shelley boldly prepared a ‘Discourse on the Manners of the Ancients Relative to the Subject of Love’. Ironically, the eventual publisher of the translation in 1840 obliged Mary Shelley to make precisely those changes Shelley had resisted;20 and even Shelley himself softened the more explicit Greek phrases, to imply profound friendship rather than sex.21 The strength of this cultural taboo indicates not only one reason why Plato was marginalized in general, but also quite possibly why Coleridge did not eagerly seize upon those dialogues which might have been most interesting for his theory of Imagination: especially Symposium and Phaedrus.22 Coleridge firmly denied that Shakespeare’s sonnets might express homosexual desire: for so incomparable a poet must have been ‘in his heart’s heart chaste’.23 Coleridge’s command of Greek was such that he could not have explained away the problem in Plato as he did in Shakespeare.24 Only in the privacy of his notebook did he allude to Aristophanes’ speech in Symposium, when he wrote (in longing for a beloved), every generous mind not already filled by some one of these [meaner] passions feels its Halfness — it cannot think without a symbol — neither can it live without something that is to be at once its Symbol, & its Other half.25

Likewise the Symposium was probably a source for Coleridge’s frequent assertion

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of the androgyny of the poet’s mind; but distaste for the Greek ‘vice’ may have deterred him from direct discussion of such works. Meanwhile, inf luential francophone writing on Plato in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tended to be hostile. Coleridge’s reference to Plato’s nonsense and dreaming echoes, whether consciously or not, the language of the French encyclopaedists. ‘Plato was a great dreamer’, smiled Voltaire: ‘Dreams were at that time in great repute’; and Diderot complained of Plato’s obscurity: ‘These dialogues so admired by the ancients are today insupportable’.26 Such judgements accorded with the English tradition of Lockean rationalism, too. Those who supported Locke’s demand for clear and distinct ideas in philosophy could have little sympathy with Ideas of the Platonic brand. A reader who turned to the famous Cyclopaedia edited by the Presbyterian divine Abraham Rees would have found, under ‘PLATONISM’, a tirade against Plato’s obscurity, distilled from William Enfield’s abridgement of the compendious history of philosophy by Johann Jakob Brucker.27 This article states that Plato deviated from the ‘path of common sense’ of his master Socrates, into ‘errors which he adopted from foreign philosophy’ (i.e. Pythagoras), not least that of concealing his real opinion. Plato’s metaphysics are summarized as follows: Raising man above his condition and nature, Plato unites him to certain imaginary divine principles, leads him through various orders of emanation and forms of intelligence to the Supreme Being, and represents these fictions of fancy as the first principles of wisdom.

The continuation seems to anticipate from the reader a kind of reverential stupor towards Plato, which ought to be dispelled: ‘In such a wondrous maze of words does Plato involve his notions, that none of his disciples, not even the sagacious Stagirite, could unfold them; and yet we receive them as sacred mysteries’. A far more temperate appraisal appears in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but this writer too finds ‘mystery, confusion and apparent absurdity’ in Plato’s cosmology.28 Connected with this charge of obscurity, Plato’s thought was increasingly regarded as the source of supposed corruption of Christian doctrine, and it was precisely this version of Plato — the proponent of a mysterious and mystifying theology — that initially impinged on Coleridge. Thus when Gibbon ironized the Trinitarian controversy during the reign of Constantine, he laid much of the blame for the intolerance and persecution of that time on the mystifications enabled by Plato’s theology. It all began, according to Gibbon, when Plato asked himself how the divinity, who is incorporeal, could produce the world, which is corporeal. By way of answer he dreamed up the obscure doctrine of the Trinity: The vain hope of extricating himself from these difficulties, which must ever oppress the feeble powers of the human mind, might29 induce Plato to consider the divine nature under the threefold modification; of the first cause, the reason, or Logos, and the soul or spirit of the universe. His poetical imagination sometimes fixed and animated these metaphysical abstractions; the three archical or original principles were represented in the Platonic system as three Gods, united with each other by a mysterious and ineffable generation; and the Logos was particularly considered under the more accessible character of the Son of an Eternal Father, and the Creator and Governor of the world.30

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This might surprise a modern reader as an assessment of the leading spirit of Plato’s thought; but Gibbon was accurate in documenting the genealogy of these Platonic hints through Philo Judaeus into the Church Fathers, who identified the logos of John’s gospel with Plato’s logos. Thus began the doctrine of the Trinity as enshrined in the Athanasian Creed, although its full ramifications, according to Gibbon, were not developed until long afterwards. As for Plato’s afterlife in this development, Gibbon notes ironically: The respectable name of Plato was used by the orthodox, and abused by the heretics, as the common support of truth and error: the authority of his skilful commentators, and the science of dialectics, were employed to justify the remote consequences of his opinions; and to supply the discreet silence of the inspired writers.31

Gibbon thus insinuates that the Platonic Trinity is so abstruse as to make it a perfect basis for the self-proclaimed orthodox to attack those they deemed heretics (such as Arius): whatever version of the Trinity the minority opinion professed could simply be declared heretical, by means of some intractable refinement of argument. A comparable historical argument was advanced by Joseph Priestley. Priestley’s lengthy fulminations against Gibbon’s irreligion32 cannot disguise the two writers’ common ground:33 for Priestley too portrays the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystificatory embellishment of Plato’s concepts. He does so with the Unitarian agenda of denying that the Trinity was a part of Christianity in its original, pure form. Unitarianism denied the divinity of Christ: a politically fraught position, since the universities still demanded subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, the first of which is the doctrine of the Trinity. How serious this was for the young, Unitarian Coleridge is clear from the fate of his tutor at Jesus College, William Frend, a collaborator with Priestley. Inf luenced by George Dyer’s Inquiry into the Nature of Subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles (1789), Frend proclaimed his opposition to the Articles, and was dismissed from the job of tutor for his religious unorthodoxy. When he subsequently published a pamphlet advocating peace with France, he was tried and banished from Cambridge University. Coleridge supported him at his trial in 1793 and only just escaped trouble himself.34 Urgent rather than antiquarian, then, was Priestley’s attempt to expose the ‘corruptions of Christianity’ from which the doctrine of the Trinity derived. He argues that the early Church found the Crucifixion a stumbling-block in making converts, until the Fathers adopted the convenient Platonic notion, mediated through Philo, of logos as an emanation from the Father. In this way Christ was removed from the realm of suffering humanity, and deified, making a more palatable spectacle for potential converts. A misinterpretation of St John cemented this process: The Christian philosophers having once got the idea [from Plato and Philo] that the Logos might be interpreted of Christ, proceeded to explain what John says of the Logos in the introduction of his gospel, to mean the same person, in direct opposition to what he really meant, which was that the Logos by which all things were made was not a being distinct from God, but God himself, being his attribute, his wisdom and power, dwelling in Christ, speaking and acting by him.35

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Original Christianity, that is, including John, simply did not make this Platonic assertion of a personified logos. An History of the Corruptions of Christianity was intended as a popular work. Shortly afterwards Priestley published a book aimed at scholars (but maintaining the same plain, demystifying prose style): An History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ, Compiled from Original Writers; Proving that the Early Church was at first Unitarian. Here he evinces a fresh approach to Plato. Rather than relying primarily, as Gibbon had, on Ralph Cudworth’s vast repository of Neoplatonic and Patristic learning,36 Priestley examines Plato’s works directly — a rare undertaking at that time. He repeats that the personification of logos or divine intellect was introduced by the Platonists and eagerly adopted by the Church Fathers, but he expresses doubt whether Plato himself professed any such doctrine: ‘it appears to me, from a pretty careful examination of the writings of Plato, that this was not done by himself, though the confusion of his ideas gave occasion to it, or something like it, in his followers’.37 He argues that the Demiurge in Timaeus is not a ‘second God’, but an aspect of the one supreme Being. Logos, for Plato, meant ‘speech’ or ‘reason’: it was an attribute of God, not a distinct entity or emanation. Much has been said concerning the Platonic Logos; but if by this be meant a person distinct from the being whose logos it is, we must not look for it in the writings of Plato himself, but in those of his followers.38

Priestley observes that Cudworth rests his assertion of Plato’s Trinity partly on the Second Letter, but that Cudworth’s conclusions are not ‘properly supported’, since in this letter Plato himself professes to be writing so obscurely that only the recipient (Dionysius) should be able to divine the meaning.39 Priestley was distinctive in paying such attention to the contexts of Plato’s writing. Yet his condescension towards ancient philosophy spoils this achievement. His emphasis on Plato’s obscurity and confusion certainly has its polemical purpose; it is also not surprising that Priestley, a carefully plain prose writer, should condemn ‘the affected mysterious way of expressing himself, which [Plato] frequently adopted’.40 But he goes further, dismissing ancient thought entirely, not least with regard to the doctrine of Ideas. He cites Aristotle as explaining that this doctrine was advanced by those who believed that since all sensible things are always in f lux, and real knowledge requires a fixed object, there must exist fixed, non-corporeal entities. Priestley comments simply: ‘Such were the wretched metaphysics, undeserving of any confutation at this day, on which this sublime doctrine of ideas was founded’.41 This sounds like an attempt at Gibbon’s devastating manner, but without Gibbon’s wit. The philosophical point, however, is that Priestley believed Locke and Hume’s empirical definition of ‘idea’ to have cancelled an ancient error. A similar tendency, though a more judicious tone, appears in Caesar Morgan’s work on the Platonic trinity and its inf luences. Morgan too challenges Cudworth’s account by returning to the source: the writings of Plato himself. He states that from a meticulous reading of Plato he ‘cannot find any thing, which sufficiently proves him to have had even an obscure knowledge of the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity’.42 Morgan, more in fact than Priestley, attends to context; he too denies that the Second Letter teaches a Trinity, and offers the ingenious interpretation

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that Plato was merely trying to inculcate moderation in the recipient, the tyrant Dionysius.43 Likewise with the Timaeus, Morgan asserts that ‘it is impossible to discover in this dialogue the doctrine of the Holy Trinity’.44 But in the course of this argument he travesties Timaeus’ description of the pattern according to which the Demiurge made the world, dismissing any possibility that Plato’s speaker intended to signify a self-subsistent realm of Ideas: If due allowance be made for the peculiar language of the Pythagorean and Platonic schools; nothing can be more plain, than that the pattern signifies no more than the abstract idea, according to which the universe was formed, with parts in the one answering to parts in the other.45

Thus Morgan separates the form from the content of the dialogue: stripping away the ‘peculiar language’ supposedly shows that Plato had a perfectly Lockean notion of ‘abstract idea’. Although the careful readings of Priestley and Morgan had begun to disentangle Plato from the later Trinitarian trappings, then, their basic antipathy to his ‘peculiar language’ precluded any substantial appreciation of the dialogues. The eighteenth-century ad fontes disentanglement of Plato from later traditions also had a second aspect. This was the Dissenters’ frequent treatment of Socrates as a distinct figure rather than as a mere mouthpiece for Plato, the point usually being to claim that Socrates maintained a view of divine unity, which Plato then either wilfully distorted or allowed to become obscure. This claim led to vigorous discussion of the implications of Socrates’ life for the Christian religion. John Gilbert Cooper’s Life of Socrates, a very popular biography that ran to several editions after its first publication in 1749, argues that Socrates taught Plato and his other disciples the following irreproachably deistic doctrine: that God was ONE eternal, uncreated, immutable, immaterial, incomprehensible Being; that he was omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely good and wise; that he created and continued to govern by his unerring Wisdom all Things in universal Harmony; that he regarded Mankind with a particular Affection, and indued them with Reason, that Ray of divine Light, to guide their Steps in this probationary State to temporal, and afterwards eternal Happiness, thro’ the Paths of Virtue.46

Cooper’s polemic is directed against priestcraft of all kinds and in all ages: in his view, the virtue both of Socrates’s principles and of his conduct demonstrate that there is nothing peculiar to Christian revelation that pagans could not discover by the light of reason. Reason itself, not the Bible or the interpretations of the Church, is the ‘Ray of divine Light’ that illuminates the human mind, and this is the principle for which Socrates laid down his life.47 For efforts such as Cooper’s to displace the Christian religion by elevating Socratic reason, Socrates’ famous maxim in Euthyphro provided effective ammunition: the good is not good because God wills it, but God wills it because it is good.48 It was owing to his non-Christian but exemplary rationality that Socrates was made the main protagonist of Moses Mendelssohn’s work on the immortality of the soul, a book which Cooper’s own translation made well-known in England; and Kant, too, differentiated Plato sharply from Socrates, identifying his own call to the individual exercise of reason with Socrates’.49

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Ever since the Italian Renaissance, those who elevated Socrates’ moral character in this way had looked for sources not just to Plato, but to an even greater extent to the very different Xenophon, whom Cooper reverently names ‘the philosophic Historian’. Sarah Fielding’s translation of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates went through several editions in the late eighteenth century. It is partly because Xenophon’s Socrates does not indulge in riddling irony — or indeed pederasty — that Plato was often thought to have distorted his master’s pure teaching (as in the above-cited entry in Rees’s Cyclopaedia). Xenophon’s memoirs also contain valuable evidence about Socrates’ daemon: whereas in Plato, the daemon only makes itself known to prevent him from doing something he had intended, in Xenophon it is a form of divination, which gives positive advice. J. J. Zimmermann had argued early in the eighteenth century that Socrates’ daemon was an example of a miracle, at least as well attested as those of Christ; and the more theologians such as Paley relied on miracles as ‘evidences of Christianity’, the more pressing the problem of Socrates’ daemon became. Sarah Fielding interprets it as comfortably as she can for Christian readers: the daemon was probably ‘nothing more than an uncommon Strength of Judgment, and Justness of Thinking’, Socrates’ ‘unclouded’ mind affording him insight into the future on the basis of past experience.50 Priestley might have sympathized with Cooper’s deployment of the example of Socrates against priestcraft. However, Priestley could not countenance the impli­ cation that the claims of Christianity to uniqueness are false, and in Socrates and Jesus Compared he allows Socrates just ‘an honourable sentiment concerning the divine power and providence’, but no more than that.51 Lacking revelation, Socrates simply could not have attained the moral sublimity of Christ, and Priestley attempts to demonstrate this by a point-for-point comparison between their respective lives, showing at every stage ‘the great advantage of revealed religion’. As for Socrates’ daemon, Priestley suggests: ‘These intimations, in whatever manner they were communicated, are now, I believe, generally thought to have been a mere illusion, when nothing really supernatural took place’.52 Yet even Priestley, usually breezily rationalistic, has to confess that the topic is not closed, since ‘enthusiasm’ was not generally a feature of Socrates’ character. Coleridge was eventually to discuss Socrates and his daemon in the Philosophical Lectures of 1819, by which time he had absorbed a good deal of new German scholarship on the matter as well as having ref lected on Socrates’ portrayal of divine inspiration in Platonic dialogues such as the Ion. In the mid-1790s, however, the inf luence of Priestley on him was marked, and particularly so in the Lectures on Revealed Religion of 1795.53 In Lecture Three, Coleridge refers to a moral decline in the ancient world from ‘The simple Doctrines of the pure Socratic School’ to Stoic pride and Epicurean sensuality.54 In Lecture Five, he traces a comparable decline in Christendom from initial purity to subsequent corruption. He regards the doctrine of the Trinity as the vehicle for the imposture of priests, who gained power for themselves by clouding the plain truth of the gospel. Plato enabled this, but was not entirely guilty — ‘Plato, the wild-minded Disciple of Socrates who hid Truth in a dazzle of fantastic allegory, and is dark with excess of Brightness’.55 It was in the light of the eighteenth-century engagement with Socrates just

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described that Coleridge describes Plato primarily as the ‘Disciple’ of the former, and the notion that Plato ‘hid’ truth is consonant with the familiar imputation that something of Socratic purity is attenuated in the Platonic dialogues. However, this is clearly far from a hostile description of Plato. The epithet ‘wild-minded’ is double-edged rather than condemnatory, ‘wild’ usually denoting a quality of fascination in Coleridge’s verse. Further, in alluding to Milton’s words, ‘Dark with excessive bright’, Coleridge begins a longstanding personal association of Plato with Milton. Coleridge states that Plato discerned three principles in the world, which he believed must be in God in an infinite degree: ‘Life or Power, which Plato calls the Spirit’; above this, ὁ Λόγος — the same word which St John uses’; and above this, ‘the principle of Benevolence’, which he called ‘The one and the good’. Coleridge summarizes: ‘These three Principles are equally God, and God is one — a mysterious way of telling a plain Truth, namely that God is a living Spirit, infinitely powerful, wise and benevolent’.56 The really dangerous corruption occurred subsequently to Plato: ‘From the Gnostics the Christians had learnt the trick of personifying abstract Qualities, and from Plato they learned their Trinity in Unity’.57 Coleridge employs the same vocabulary in describing the Gnostics as he does for Plato: their opinions were wild and fanciful yet peculiarly fascinating to the taste of a vitiated age, in which intellectual Brilliance received the honours due only to patient investigation, and the Philosopher invading the province of the Poet endeavoured to strike and dazzle by bold Fiction, and allegoric Personi­ fication.58

Here is an early sign of Coleridge’s sensitivity to the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy: an anxiety about the possible inadequacy to philosophical truth of wild platonic ‘dazzle’. Even while taking an essentially Priestleyan line, however, Coleridge finds far more of value in Plato than the Unitarian polemicist ever did: But though Plato dressed Truth in the garb of Nonsense, still it was Truth, and they who would take the Trouble of unveiling her, might discover and distinguish all the Features, but this would not answer the ends of the Priest.59

If Plato wrote nonsense, that is to say, it was dear gorgeous nonsense, worth the unravelling. Coleridge continued to use this formulation around 1810, puzzling over an obscure part of the Timaeus: ‘I can not believe, but there must be sense at least under all the Passages, however nonsensical in appearance, of a work written by one and the same mind’ as wrote the more obviously excellent passages.60 With this desire to detect the truth hidden by the dazzle of Plato’s texts begins another of Coleridge’s longstanding preoccupations: the attempt to lift the veil, to tease out that part of Plato which seems hidden or esoteric. One early way this preoccupation manifested itself was in Coleridge’s charac­ terization of Plato as a mystic. The polarity of nonsense and truth, ‘dark with excessive bright’, is ref lected in the following image, which was so adhesive in Coleridge’s mind that he uses identical expressions in Notebook entries separated by at least six years:

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Dear Gorgeous Nonsense The sunny mist, the luminous gloom of Plato — The sunny mist, the luminous Gloom, of Plato. —

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In each case this sentence is followed by almost identical descriptions of a waterfall; I quote only the first: Mist as from volcano — Waterfall rolled after long looking like a segment of a Wheel — the rock gleaming thro’ it — Amid the roar of noise as of innumerable grasshoppers or of spinning wheels.62

This image is barely developed, but does the ‘rock’, gleaming through mist generated by the turbulence of Plato’s mind, represent the esoteric kernel of truth, to be discovered behind the veil? Coleridge’s description of Jakob Böhme invites comparison: he imagines Böhme as an unlearned version of Plato,63 and associates both philosophers with the sublime in nature. [B]eing a poor unlearned Man [Böhme] contemplated Truth and the forms of Nature thro’ a luminous Mist, the vaporous darkness rising from his Ignorance and accidental peculiarities of fancy and sensation, but the Light streaming into it from his inmost Soul. What wonder then, if in some places the Mist condenses into a thick smoke with a few wandering rays darting across it & sometimes overpowers the eye with a confused Dazzle?64

The polarity of darkness and Light, mist and ‘dazzle’ is both reminiscent of the ‘fair luminous mist’ of ‘Dejection: An Ode’ and recalls some of Böhme’s own imagery, but this is also precisely the vocabulary Coleridge uses of Plato. The reader can glimpse the ‘forms of Nature’ gleaming through the mist of inarticulate thought like the rock in the waterfall image. It may be that, since Coleridge read Böhme at school, his knowledge of the ‘teutonic theosopher’ directly coloured his first opinions of Plato. At any rate the association stuck. As Coleridge’s direct knowledge of Plato increased, he ceased to associate Plato in general with ignorance or wild, undisciplined mysticism; but rather than discard this notion he revised it to apply only to an early stage of Plato’s compositional process (see Chapter 4). Meanwhile, detecting the esoteric in Plato was to become a more scholarly project — yet the impetus for the investigation is traceable to these earliest comments. The popular and disapproving association of Plato with mysticism even presents an opportunity for Coleridge’s Platonic self-fashioning: when he complains of being ‘gossiped about, as devoted to metaphysics, and worse than all to a system incomparably nearer to the visionary f lights of Plato, and even to the jargon of the mystics, than to the established tenets of Locke’, he is (as Perry remarks) delighting in his otherworldly reputation.65 Coleridge’s willingness to discover Truth behind Plato’s ‘nonsense’ ref lects the fact that despite much initial agreement with Priestley, Coleridge never shared Priestley’s contempt for ancient philosophy. He was to deplore the arrogance of Priestley and assertors of philosophical progress generally: ‘Plato, and Aristotle were great & astonishing Geniuses, and yet there is not a Presbyterian Candidate for a Conventicle but believes that they were mere children in Knowledge compared with himself & Drs Priestley & Rees, &c — ’.66 It is typical that at the same time as he read Priestley, he was deep in Cudworth. I have suggested that Plato was unfashionable

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around 1795: the universities ignored him; the encyclopaedists dismissed him as a dreamer; the Dissenters blamed him as a source of Trinitarianism. Yet Coleridge was himself ‘wild-minded’, a dreamer,67 and a successful Grecian; and moreover the doctrine of the Trinity made theoretical sense to him even when he most strongly opposed it. Before long, of course, he became a Trinitarian whilst openly professing allegiance to Plato (and Kant). But the earlier, Unitarian phase was not merely outgrown and left behind. What remained was the imperative to penetrate to origins — to discover Socrates behind Plato, and Plato behind the Neoplatonists, and to speculate on the inception and evolution of Plato’s genius. This mingled with the hope of discovering the esoteric, the true doctrine behind the surface uncertainty or concealment. In his time, Coleridge was uniquely placed to develop this interest, since it required sensitivity to philosophy and poetry together, which Priestley and Morgan with their strictly unpoetic concept of ‘idea’ lacked. And yet, as just noted, the tension of the Ancient Quarrel between poetry and philosophy appears even in the 1790s. Responding to the sonnet of Coleridge I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Thelwall objected to the notion of pre-existence as (appropriately enough) ‘mystical’. Coleridge replied: ‘Now that the thinking part of Man, i.e. the Soul, existed previously to it’s appearance in it’s present body, may be very wild philosophy; but it is very intelligible poetry, inasmuch as Soul is an orthodox word in all our poets’.68 Whether intelligible poetry justifies wild philosophy will become an important question touching on the concept of inspiration. Coleridge’s earliest, mostly indirect encounters with Plato were thus full of anticipations of his future views and appropriations of him. Did Coleridge Read Plato by Anticipation? Denn, hätte ich nicht die Welt durch Antizipation bereits in mir getragen, ich wäre mit sehenden Augen blind geblieben, und alle Erforschung und Erfahrung wäre nichts gewesen als ein totes, vergebliches Bemühen. [For if I had not already carried the world within me through anticipation, with seeing eyes I would have remained blind, and all exploration and experience would have been nothing but a dead, futile struggle] (Goethe in conversation with Eckermann, 24 February 1824)

Coleridge’s early sympathy with Plato developed rapidly; and eventually, in what Perry has aptly termed Coleridge’s ‘critical mythology’,69 Plato attains the highest status as the consummate poetic philosopher, an idealized type of Coleridge himself. While Shakespeare is deified (‘the one Proteus of the fire and the f lood’), ‘the divine Plato’ enters the pantheon alongside him: ‘From Shakespeare to Plato, from the philosophic poet to the poetic philosopher, the transition is easy’.70 It is, however, precisely this Coleridgean mythology that makes it difficult to deter­ mine how or how well Coleridge knew Plato at any particular stage. Critics are divided according to their sympathies between extreme claims: that he was totally familiar with Plato in Greek; or that he had nothing more than scraps of secondary knowledge. His own laconic retrospective comment on his reading of Plato, though, may be quite revealing: ‘I have read several71 of the works of Plato

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several times with profound attention, but not all his writings. I soon found that I had read Plato by anticipation. He was a consummate genius’.72 The expression ‘by anticipation’ seems at first sight eccentric enough to suggest table talk-ese on the part of the editor. It might be thought that Coleridge is expressing no more than a sense of congeniality with Plato, praising Plato much as he praises the Bible by saying ‘in the Bible there is more, that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together’.73 Yet the word anticipation — which in fact features often in Coleridge’s later prose — seems to me particularly rich in this context, and I will use it as a way into the puzzle of Coleridge’s acquaintance with Plato — in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. Literally, then, the word ‘anticipation’ echoes Coleridge’s semi-mythological portrayal of his own intellectual development, recorded most fully in chapter nine of Biographia Literaria. The substance of this self-portrayal is that as a precocious youngster Coleridge imbibed complex Platonic texts, which prepared his mind for the reception of Kant and other German philosophers. An essay by Charles Lamb sonorously recollects Coleridge at Christ’s Hospital School as ‘the inspired charityboy!’ unfolding, ‘in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus’.74 Coleridge mentions in a letter that Lamb compiled the essay chief ly from his — Coleridge’s — recollections, so that this testimony to Coleridge’s early reading taste might well be in fact another self-commentary.75 Certainly Coleridge wanted to emphasize the chronological priority of the Neoplatonists in his development as proof that he had anticipated the most important concepts of German transcendentalism. About thirty-five years ago critical opinion polarized over this anticipatory claim of Coleridge’s. On the one hand McFarland endorsed it to defend Coleridge against the charge of plagiarism from German writers. On the other, Fruman, adapting an excellent essay by Richard Haven, argued that there is insufficient evidence of Coleridge’s youthful knowledge of Neoplatonism, and accused Coleridge of dishonest self-dramatisation.76 Since then, to my knowledge, there has been very little substantial discussion of Coleridge’s earlier Platonic studies. This is partly because the debate stuck in fruitless attacks and defences of plagiarism.77 Another reason, however, is probably that it is difficult, and not always desirable, to separate Coleridge’s views on Plato from his views on a large number of Platonists, which renders futile the attempt to map Platonic influences on Coleridge. As Perry says: ‘Coleridge was attracted as much by the broader Platonic tradition as by Plato himself: in fact the two seem to have been hard to disentangle in the eighteenth century’.78 However, the two did begin to be disentangled in the nineteenth century; and I have shown above the initial steps in the work of Priestley and Morgan. Looking beyond the question of inf luence, we can see that Coleridge’s writings mark the first substantial advances in this direction: in theory, albeit not usually in practice, he insists on reading Plato in his own right, differentiated from subsequent interpreters. Coleridge’s explanation on this subject reveals a further literal dimension of his notion of reading Plato ‘by anticipation’. Strikingly he suggests, in the following proposed training-scheme for young clergymen, that one should read Plato after reading the Neoplatonists:

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To state the reasons why it is recommended to Clergymen who propose to themselves & have means & leisure to acquire all the knowledge that more especially bears on thy high & aweful Calling, assuredly the primacy of human occupations, that they should study the Platonic Philosophy — to them we would point out according to our best judgment & experience the best preparation for & the best mode of acquiring of it — First, then, procathartically, the study of the true transcendental Logic [. . .] — with this amulet armed the student should begin with Sallustius περι θεων/then to Plotinus — after this to Proclus’s Platonic Theology & Elements of Theology — then to read his Timæus — After this, proceed to Plato’s Works, using indeed the Bipont Edition with Tiedemann’s Prolegemenon [sic] & the Dialogues; but still studying carefully Ficinus’s Notes — & even collating his Translation with the sense attributed by the Bipontine edition — And to each of these premise an introductory statement of the characteristics of each Author — as of Sallust — how far acted on by Christianity — of Plotinus, as the middle stage, how far he had carried the impersonating, entifying spirit of Platonism beyond the allowed Limits of just transcendental Logic — then Proclus, as the extreme of this — and having thus formed a complete notion of what Platonism became, then to come to the Source — & there learn, how far the germs are contained in the writings of Plato, Timæus Locrus, & Ocellus Lucanus/how far they have tortured the innocent text by the same processes, as the Theologians have the Text of the Bible, especially, Solomon’s Song & the Psalms — & how far they have improved, how far corrupted the original Platonic Doctrines//79

Of Coleridge’s various breathless schemes in what De Quincey called his ‘spirit of universal research’,80 this is one of the more feasible. It also had practical conse­ quences, in that it was probably just such a scheme that Coleridge pursued later with his Thursday evening class in Highgate.81 Two points emerge from this passage. First, that Coleridge was sufficiently acquainted with Plato scholarship to know the best texts. The Bipont Edition was the best available, more legible and probably more accurate than previous editions.82 The Greek is printed at the top of the page, conveniently accompanied by Ficino’s Latin translation below, which was still considered superior to Serranus’ later Latin version. Coleridge mentions Tiedemann’s extensive Dialogorum Platonis argumenta exposita et illustrata (Bipont, 1786) separately, since it is a companion volume, not incorporated in the main work. Coleridge adds ‘but still studying carefully Ficinus’ notes’, for these are not included in the Bipont edition: it would be necessary to find them in the Lyons 1557/1556 edition.83 The work of ‘collating’ would be required because Ficino’s translation was based on inferior Greek texts from that of Henricus Stephanus which is used in the Bipont.84 The text now regarded as a forgery, ‘Timaeus Locrus de Anima Mundi’, appears in the list because it immediately follows the Timaeus in volume x of the Bipont edition.85 When Coleridge writes of ‘the impersonating, entifying spirit of Platonism’ he refers in the Christian context to the doctrine of the Logos as a Person, in some sense distinct from the Father, as developed by the platonizing Church Fathers; while the notion that the endlessly multiplying hypostases of (above all) Proclus might transgress the ‘Limits of just transcendental Logic’ ref lects his application of Kantian thought to Platonism. Although Coleridge’s reading scheme may sound archaic or esoteric today, then, it incorporates the most important contemporary advances in scholarship.

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The second point regards Coleridge’s striking order of priorities. Only after a course of logic and Neoplatonism is the student to proceed to Plato’s works, the ‘Source’ of all these later writings. Coleridge, having learnt from Cudworth and Priestley, presents the history of Platonic exegesis as both parallel to and involved in that of biblical exegesis, albeit with the difference that whereas the Bible cannot be improved, Plato can. Nevertheless this parallel dignifies Plato, as does the strength of feeling implied in the suggestion that interpreters torture Plato’s texts. To read Plato by anticipation means to read chronologically backwards: switching metaphors, the aim is finally to perceive the rock lying behind the mist thrown up by the waterfall of obscurities and interpretations in the Platonic tradition, the mist nevertheless remaining an intrinsic part of the whole scene. This might not be as eccentric as it seems: the idea that certain writers have been appropriated so extensively that they cannot be perceived apart from their ‘afterlife’ is, after all, gaining ever more critical currency in the twenty-first century. Coleridge’s model, though, of ‘anticipation’ rather than ‘afterlife’, contains a suggestion of saving the best until last. It is likely that Coleridge’s recommendation sprang from his own practice. He claims to base his study plan not only on his judgement but also on his ‘experience’. This may be a clue that his own studies had proceeded broadly in the order outlined, Neoplatonists first (albeit initially without ‘transcendental Logic’), Plato second. The account in the Biographia implies this too.86 This conclusion is moreover supported by a consideration of which texts the young Coleridge actually read. Although Cole­r idge’s interest in biblical Greek and facility for the language are undoubted (his Platonic reading scheme of 1810 coincided with plans for compiling a Greek lexicon87), I am not aware of any clear evidence that he studied Greek philosophy in depth in the original at least before 1817;88 whereas it is certain that he read some of Thomas Taylor’s translations. He listed ‘Taylor the Platonist’ among his ‘darling studies’ in 1796.89 When Coleridge told Sotheby in autumn 1802 that he had been reading Parmenides and Timaeus ‘with great care’ the preceding winter he was probably using Taylor’s translation;90 and in 1810 he seems to have returned to Taylor again.91 In 1787 Taylor had published a paraphrase of Plotinus’ Ennead ‘Concerning the Beautiful’ (1:6) and of the Hymns of Orpheus,92 and in 1788 a translation of Proclus’ commentaries on Euclid. Coleridge might have read these works at school, and even if not, it is likely that he read them before reading Taylor’s first translation of Plato, which appeared in 1793 towards the end of Coleridge’s time at Cambridge. Coleridge acquired this latter translation, of The Cratylus, Phaedo, Parmenides and Timaeus, probably before 1801. Wordsworth later borrowed Coleridge’s copy,93 now in the library of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. Coleridge annotated it only mini­ mally, but it looks fairly well thumbed, whether by Coleridge, Wordsworth, or both. One marginale scribbled in the margin to this translation of Taylor — reproduced on the front cover of this book — indicates that Coleridge treated the reading of Plato as a spiritual exercise. Coleridge highlights the passage in Timaeus in which Timaeus prays with Socrates that their difficult discourse about the universe, ‘the image of that which is immutable’, may be enlightened and self-consistent: for to discover ‘the artificer and father of the universe is indeed difficult’. Coleridge comments:

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This seems to be a most beautiful mode of Prayer. — 1st to give the mind certain definite objects of Thought by utterance of words; & then leaving the mind in silence to attach to those Thoughts, undisturbed by an of the will in the motion of the organs, or by impressions on the bodily senses, a feeling of Devotion & Dependence.94

This suggests that Coleridge saw in the Timaeus neither the kind of crude design argument for the existence of God against which he himself reacted in later works, nor simply a vague piety; but rather an effort to bridge the distance between the finite and the infinite by allowing words to dissolve into a religious sense of wonder. Indeed, Coleridge deeply approved of Plato’s detection of traces of the divine in the visible universe: his comment on the following sentence — ‘For the divinity being willing to assimilate this universe in the most exquisite degree, to that which is the most beautiful and every way perfect of intelligible objects, he composed it one visible animal, containing within itself all such animals as are allied to its nature’ — consists of one word only: ‘admirable’. Another notebook entry of 1810 casts further light (and darkness, of course) on Coleridge’s reading of Taylor. Here he discusses his early enthusiasm for ‘the Doctrine of Plato, or of the Plotino-platonic Philosophy’. After insisting that Platonism ‘rouses [the mind] to acts and energies of creative Thought, & Recognition — of conscious re-production of states of Being’, he continues: I was not originally led to the study of this Philosophy by Taylor’s Translations; but in consequence of early, half-accidental prepossession in favor of it sent in early manhood for Taylor’s Translations & Commentaries — & this, I will say, that no man worthy of the name of man can read the many extracts from Proclus, Porphyry, Plotinus, &c, those I mean, chief ly, that relate to the moral claims of our Nature, without an ahndung, an inward omening, of a system congruous with his nature, & thence attracting it — /The boast therefore of the modern Philosophy is to me the decisive proof if its being an Anti-philosophy, or at best a psilosophy, that it calls the mere understanding into exertion without exciting or wakening any interest, any tremulous feeling of the heart, as if it heard or began to glimpse something which had once belonged to it, its Lord or its Beloved — even as a man recovering gradually from an alienation of the Senses or the Judgments on beginning to recollect the countenances of his Wife, Mother, Children, or Betrothed — /95

This entry further confirms that Coleridge read the other ‘Ps’ before Plato himself. It leaves frustratingly undisclosed what this vague-sounding ‘half-accidental prepossession’ in favour of Platonism was. However, the notion of a prepossession of some sort accords elegantly with the Coleridgean mythology. This, then, is the metaphorical sense in which Coleridge read Plato by anticipation: he claims a prior mental fitness to learn from Plato. In studying Platonic philosophy he begins to glimpse something which he then realizes belonged to his nature all along, despite the supposed corrupting inf luence of the contemporary empiricist bias. On the basis of this concept of reciprocity between the seeking reader and the answering text, Coleridge criticizes Taylor’s work severely: Taylor could not have understood the System, he teaches — for had he done so, he must have understood the difficulties that oppose its reception, the

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Dear Gorgeous Nonsense objections which immediately occur to men formed under notions so alien from it — Whereas he no where prepares the mind, no where shows himself in a state of Sympathy with the hesitating Examiner — .96

The statement that Taylor ‘no where prepares the mind’ gets to the heart of Coleridge’s concern: Taylor’s failure to comprehend that a major component of Platonic philosophy is mental preparation, or anticipation of future growth in consciousness, betrays his ignorance. It has been claimed that Coleridge’s criticisms of Taylor must ref lect a detailed knowledge of the Greek texts.97 Although it is true that Coleridge does sometimes refer to particular Greek words, and in 1810 complains of not having Proclus’ Greek commentary to the Timaeus to hand,98 no specialist study, however, is needed to recognize that Taylor shows more interest in preaching to the converted than encouraging intellectual seekers.99 For example the paraphrase of Plotinus on Beauty, which admittedly did impress Coleridge, concludes with this denunciation of the vanity of empiricism: Impetuous ignorance is thundering at the bulwarks of philosophy, and her sacred retreats are in danger of being demolished, through our feeble resistance. Rise, then, my friends, and the victory will be ours. The foe is indeed numerous, but, at the same time, feeble: and the weapons of truth, in the hands of vigorous union, descend with irresistible force, and are fatal wherever they fall.100

This crusading rhetoric could hardly be farther removed from Coleridge’s intuition of the soul gradually recovering from an alienation of the judgement and, like the Ancient Mariner, coming home. Kathleen Raine was right to emphasize Taylor’s inf luence on several of the canonical Romantics early in their careers;101 but Taylor’s unattractive invocation of a militant band of pagan Truth-lovers tends to indicate why Coleridge, Blake, and others subsequently lost whatever enthusiasm they might initially have felt for him. It does not quite explain, however, the degree to which Taylor’s work was reviled even by those who persevered through it. Coleridge scribbled impatiently in a margin: ‘Southey very happily called Taylor a Pagan Methodist! He is indeed a thorough blind Bigot, ignorant of all with which he is intoxicated — rather, with the slang of which he is bewitched’.102 But this is mild by comparison with Taylor’s reviewers, of whom James Mill is both the best informed and most damning: ‘He has not translated Plato; he has travestied him, in the most cruel and abominable manner’.103 Mill’s most damaging attack regards the quality of the translation: he asserts that Taylor often translates from Ficino’s Latin rather than Plato’s Greek, making errors identical with Ficino’s.104 But when Mill complains that ‘He has not elucidated, but covered [Plato] over with impenetrable darkness’, he is referring not so much to Taylor’s alleged grammatical mistakes as to his attachment to the Neoplatonists, especially Proclus. Mill objects both to the fact that Taylor’s commentary, rather than offering substantial explanation, consists of a mass of translations from the Neoplatonic commentators on Plato; and that Taylor’s own language has been inf luenced by these sources: it is ‘stiff, awkward and uncouth’, in ‘the base jargon of the latter Platonists’105 — precisely the ‘slang’ and ‘strange English’ that Coleridge laments.106 Mill is remarkably violent against the Neoplatonists themselves, whom he calls ‘the charlatans of ancient philosophy’, purveyors of an ‘absurd and disgusting jargon’.107

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James Mill, then, manifests much more extremely than Coleridge the new tendency to strip Plato of Neoplatonic accretion. Taylor’s inelegant prose has the virtue, as we might now see it, of intimating the sheer remoteness of Plato in time and culture — of never allowing us to feel we are reading a modern English writer. But this non-English feel is exactly what Mill, Coleridge, and others repudiated. Mary Shelley accurately sums up readers’ feelings: Taylor’s translation is ‘so harsh and un-English in its style, as universally to repel’.108 The rejection of Taylor arguably ref lects a wider phenomenon in the early nine­ teenth-century reception of Greek culture. Wallace assesses the general situation in this way: Neither completely novel and marginal, as in the eighteenth century, nor institutionalised and central as in the later nineteenth century, Greece at the turn of the century challenged readers and writers to determine the degree of its closeness to their culture.109

If a Greek writer such as Plato is to be reabsorbed into British culture, he must be made to speak in an intelligible idiom, far from the alienating foreignness of Proclus. Anecdotally, the English desire to absorb Plato into a comfortable selfimage is expressed in Emerson’s report of a conversation with Wordsworth in 1848. Astonished that Taylor’s translations of Plato were hardly known in England (whereas they were popular in America), Emerson wondered whether, if Plato’s Republic were published in England as a new book today, it would find any readers. Wordsworth agreed it would not. ‘ “And yet,” he added after a pause, with that complacency which never deserts a true-born Englishman, “and yet we have embodied it all.” ’110 The translation of Benjamin Jowett (first published in 1871) is of course more accurate than Taylor’s, but another reason for its success was that it at last gave readers what they wanted: a Plato with a contemporary English relevance and vocabulary. It was the boast of Jowett’s biographers on his behalf that ‘Plato was now an English book’.111 The vast gap between Taylor’s anachronism and Jowett’s modernity ref lects the change in attitudes to Plato beginning in Coleridge’s time, and which Coleridge probably helped to instrument. In declaring a sense of homecoming when he reads Plato (the sonnet alluding to the doctrine of pre-existence was ‘Composed on a Journey Homeward’), the metaphorical sense of reading ‘by anticipation’, Coleridge too is beginning to claim him as part of an English culture, a father figure for ‘spiritual platonic old England’.112 In this sense Pater was strictly accurate when he said that Coleridge claimed Plato ‘as the first of his spiritual ancestors’.113 However, if there was a kind of patriotism in his assimilation of Plato into his critical mythology, it was not easily achieved: Plato ‘wanted a patron’ at the start of the century (as Peacock said), and Coleridge’s moulding of Platonic concepts was wider-ranging than that of his contemporaries, in that it spanned poetry and philosophy, and the tension between them. By way of conclusion to this chapter I want to suggest further that to read ‘by anticipation’ is a critical concept which itself ref lects intuitive closeness to Plato. It involves, that is, a ‘recognition’ when one encounters the Platonic text: the mind of a sympathetic reader anticipates the text, and the text reciprocally anti­ cipates the mind — there is movement in both directions. The anticipatory response is non-disinterested, a process not of discovery, but ‘recognition’: a Latinate word,

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but Coleridge later attributes it to Plato himself.114 A later English Platonist, Iris Murdoch, made the very similar observation that much pleasure in art is a pleasure of recognition of what we vaguely knew was there but never saw before. Art is mimesis and good art is, to use another Platonic term, anamnesis, ‘memory’ of what we did not know we knew.115

Indeed, when Coleridge uses terms such as ‘anticipation’ and ‘recognition’ he echoes Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, or recollection. According to a recurring Platonic myth, which Socrates expounds in a state of inspiration in Phaedrus, the human soul beholds the life-giving Ideas, Beauty being the most splendid, prior to its incarnation on earth. When incarnated, it tends to forget its heavenly vision, but then it beholds specific beautiful things (young men) on earth, which prompt it to recollect the absolute vision of the Ideas. This myth is consonant with the suggestion in Meno and Republic (which Coleridge employs in the concept of Method in The Friend) that all education is a process of coaxing the mind into recalling or unfolding what is already within. The concept of anamnesis reached Coleridge not only directly, from these dialogues, but also via a long tradition: Augustine discusses memoria in the tenth book of his Confessions, and most crucially, Plotinus employs it in his aforementioned Ennead on the beautiful (1.6). However, by the time Coleridge came to write about this concept in its Plotinian form, he had also absorbed Kant’s concept of the a priori, and the aesthetic theory of his Critique of the Power of Judgment. It is to Kant that we now turn. Notes to Chapter 1 1. CL i, 295. The reference may be to the Myth of Er (Republic 617b–d): the shafts of the Spindle of Necessity combine to form one harmony. Plato’s Spindle of Necessity would probably have appealed to Coleridge in his necessitarian phase. On harmony, cf. Timaeus 47c–d. 2. CL i, 260. 3. See David Fairer, ‘ “A little sparring about Poetry”: Coleridge and Thelwall, 1796–8’, Coleridge Bulletin, 21 (Spring 2003), 20–33. 4. On Shaftesbury see e.g. Andrea Gatti, ‘Et in Britannia Plato’: Studi sull’estetica del platonismo inglese (Bologna: CLUEB, 2001); on Berkeley’s Siris, see BL i, 303; on Coleridge’s use of Gray on Plato, see Phil. Lects. i, 186; on Akenside, see Nicholas Reid, Coleridge, Form and Symbol: Or The Ascertaining Vision (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 83–101; Harris, Hermes: or, a Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar, 4th edn (London: Nourse, 1786); Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics: Or, the Science of Universals, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1779–99); Martha K. Zebrowski, ‘Richard Price: British Platonist of the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1994), 17–35. M. Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), argues that a revival of the Platonic dialogue form occurred in eighteenth-century England. 5. See Frank B. Evans III, ‘Platonic Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century England’, Modern Philology, 41.2 (November 1943), 103–10. For extant editions, translations, and commentaries on Plato with critical assessments, see Joseph William Moss, A Manual of Classical Bibliography, 2 vols (London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1825), ii, 423–55. Kathleen Wheeler describes the revival of Greek poets in the eighteenth century, and presents a very positive view of contemporaneous Plato scholarship: ‘Blake, Coleridge, and Eighteenth-Century Greek Scholarship’, The Wordsworth Circle, 30.2 (Spring 1999), 89–94. 6. M. L. Clarke argues this in his survey of ‘Greek Philosophy’, in Greek Studies in England 1700– 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), pp. 112–22.

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7. ‘Notes on Some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato’, Monthly Repository, n.s. 8 (1834), 89. 8. The Basel folio edition of 1556: Platonis omnia opera, ed. by A. Arlenius. See M. Burnyeat, ‘Plato’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 111 (2001), 1–32. 9. Nightmare Abbey/Crotchet Castle, ed. by Raymond Wright (London: Penguin, 1969, 1986), p. 187. 10. Wordsworth’s Cambridge Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 230n. Schneider notes that a typical textbook on Newton (by Colin McLaurin, 1748) attacks the ‘mystical and unintelligible notions’ of the Platonists (Schneider, p. 93). Thomas Gray is said to have lost all patience when he talked of the neglect of his favourite author, Plato, at the Universities (Clarke, p. 112). 11. The Privileges of the University of Cambridge, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1824), 2nd supplement, pp. 223–24n. Coleridge owned a copy: see Coleridge’s Library: A Bibliography of Books Owned or Read by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Ralph J. Coffman (Boston, Mass.: Hall, 1987), p. 68. 12. CL i, 16. 13. See Kathleen Raine, ‘Thomas Taylor in England’, in Thomas Taylor the Platonist, ed. by Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 19–23. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (p. 30), speaks of a ‘revival’ of Platonic studies in Cambridge occasioned by Taylor’s translations, but offers no evidence for this. 14. ‘College Reminiscences of Mr. Coleridge’, Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 605–07 (p. 606); reprinted in Coleridge: Interviews, p. 11. 15. See James A. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1949), p. 31 — henceforth: Notopoulos. 16. Quoted in Notopoulos, p. 32. The Works of Plato, abridg’d, [. . .] by M. Dacier. Translated from the French, 2 vols (London: Bell, 1701). 17. Quoted in Notopoulos, p. 68. 18. William Haller, The Early Life of Robert Southey 1774–1803 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1917), pp. 120–21. Plato’s guardians have no private property (Republic 416d), which was also to be one of the Pantisocrats’ principles. 19. See Stefano Evangelista, ‘Against Misinterpretation: Benjamin Jowett’s Translations of Plato and the Ethics of Modern Homosexuality’, Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines, 36.3 (2003), 13–25. 20. See Notopoulos, pp. 384–88. 21. See Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 106. 22. Cf. brief quotations of Phaedrus in CN i, 1002, 1004. 23. CM i, 43 (notes made for Hartley in 1803, despite the boy’s tender age). 24. Despite a tradition which did exactly that: the English expression ‘platonic’ love derives from Ficino’s ‘amor platonicus’ which he used as synonymous with ‘amor socraticus’, terms that ascribed to Socrates a purely spiritual interest in young men (OED: ‘Platonic’, 2a.). Thus Thomas Taylor denied that ‘Socratic love’ had anything to do with ‘that unnatural vice which was so fashionable among the Greeks’ (TTS xi, 333, 347). 25. CN iii, 3325. 26. Quotations from Notopoulos, pp. 137–38. 27. Abraham Rees and others, The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, 39 vols (London, 1819), vol. xxvii. (Coleridge attacks the patronizing style of Rees’ Cyclopaedia in CL iii, 3953.) The article takes much material verbatim from the section on Plato in William Enfield, The History of Philosophy, from the earliest times to the beginning of the present century, drawn up from Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae, 2 vols (London: Baynes and Priestley, 1819), i, 206–42; reprinted from the 1791 and 1792 editions. The original was Johann Jakob Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, 6 vols (Leipzig, 1742). 28. Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature, 4th edn, 20 vols (Edinburgh, 1810), xvi, 630–38. This article too relies on Enfield. 29. Attacking Gibbon’s prose style, Coleridge notes ‘the truly ridiculous repetition of the conditional tense — might — ’ (CN iii, 3823): a means of generating irony that was anathema to Coleridge. 30. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols (1777–88; facsimile edition London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1997), ii, 238. Coleridge criticizes Gibbon’s account

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of the Platonic Trinity (CN iii, 3814) and his anecdotal method (TT i, 418–19). See further Charles De Paolo, Coleridge: Historian of Ideas (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria Press, 1992), pp. 29–36, and pp. 104–05, n. 2 — henceforth: De Paolo. 31. Gibbon, Decline, ii, 242. 32. An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, 2 vols (Birmingham, 1782), ii, 444–66; esp. p. 462. 33. Cf. Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, pp. 270–71. 34. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), pp. 47–49. 35. Corruptions, p. 31. 36. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: the first part; wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted, and its impossibility demonstrated [. . .], 2nd edn, ed. by Thomas Birch, 2 vols (London: Walthoe, 1743) — henceforth: Cudworth. 37. Early Opinions, p. 321. 38. Early Opinions, p. 325. 39. Early Opinions, pp. 349–50. See Cudworth, i, 427. Thomas Taylor translates this passage: For you say [. . .] that I have not sufficiently demonstrated to you the particulars respecting the first nature. I must speak to you therefore in enigmas, that in case the letter should be intercepted either by land or sea, he who reads it may not understand this part of its contents: All things are situated about the king of all things; and all things subsist for his sake, and he is the cause of all beautiful things. But second things are situated about that which is second; and such as are third in gradation about that which is third. The human soul therefore extends itself in order to learn the quality of these things, and looks to such particulars as are allied to itself, none of which are sufficient for the purpose. But about the king himself, and the natures of which I have spoken, there is nothing of this kind: but the soul speaks of that which is posterior to this. Indeed, O Son of Dionysius and Doris, this your inquiry [about the first nature] is as of that which is endued with a certain quality, and such an inquiry is the cause of all evils. Or rather it is a parturition respecting this ingenerated in the soul; from which he who is not liberated will never in reality acquire truth. (TTS XIII, 619–20) For Coleridge’s use of this passage, see Chapter 5. 40. Early Opinions, p. 335. 41. Early Opinions, p. 329. 42. Morgan, An Investigation of the Trinity of Plato and of Philo Judaeus, and of the Effects, which an Attachment to their Writings had upon the Principles and Reasonings of the Fathers of the Christian Church (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1795), p. 162. 43. Morgan, pp. 47–49. 44. Morgan, p. 64. 45. Morgan, p. 57. 46. The Life of Socrates, collected from the Memorabilia of Xenophon and the Dialogues of Plato [. . .] 2nd edn (London: Dodsley, 1750), pp. vi–vii. One scholarly basis for Cooper’s assertion of Socrates’ Deism was Charles Rollin’s work on ancient history, though whereas Rollin maintained that Socrates never fully escaped pagan idolatry, Cooper insists that he only pragmatically pretended to worship the Athenian gods (Cooper, pp. 28–30). 47. Benno Böhm, Sokrates im achtzehnten Jahrhundert: Studien zum Werdegange des modernen Persön­ lichkeitsbewusstseins (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz, 1966), pp. 79–84. 48. Böhm, p. 99; Euthyphro, 10D. 49. Phædon: or, the Death of Socrates. By Moses Mendelssohn, a Jew, late of Berlin. Translated from the German by J. Cooper (London: privately printed, 1789). On Kant, see Chapter 2, below. 50. Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, 3rd edn (London: T. Cadell, 1786) p. 3(n.): the daemon is described in section 1.1.4. In Plato, see esp. Apology 31c–d. 51. Socrates and Jesus Compared (London: J. Johnson, 1803), p. 6. 52. Socrates and Jesus Compared, p. 28. 53. See Lects. 1795, pp. lxi–lxii. 54. Lects. 1795, p. 156. 55. Lects. 1795, p. 208. 56. Lects. 1795, p. 208.

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57. Lects. 1795, pp. 208–09. 58. Lects 1795, pp. 196–97. 59. Lects. 1795, p. 209. 60. CM iv, 140–41. Cf. BL i, 233. 61. CN i, 528 (1796–97); CN i, 1558 (October 1803). 62. CN i, 529. 63. See CM i, 575; Phil. Lects. ii, 484. 64. CM i, 558. 65. BL ii, 240; Perry, Division, p. 44. 66. CL ii, 675. 67. For his self-diagnosis, see CL i, 67. 68. CL i, 278. 69. Perry, Division, p. 210. 70. BL ii, 27; Friend, i, 472. 71. In writing this passage up for the published edition of Table Talk, H. N. Coleridge changed the word ‘several’ to ‘most’ — a considerable difference. Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2nd edn (London: John Murray, 1836), p. 56. 72. Table Talk, i, 98–99 (31 March 1830). 73. SWF ii, 1123 (in ‘Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit’). 74. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by E. V. Lucas, 7 vols (London: Methuen, 1903), ii, 21. 75. Norman Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 117. John Beer responded that Lamb was not so pliable as that, but that nevertheless ‘we should not be totally certain about Iamblichus and Plotinus’: ‘Ice and Spring: Coleridge’s Imaginative Education’, in Coleridge’s Variety, ed. by John Beer (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 54–80 (p. 59). 76. Fruman, pp. 118–20; Haven, ‘Coleridge, Hartley, and the Mystics’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959), 477–94. 77. Walter Jackson Bate’s concise discussion of the plagiarism is outstanding: Coleridge (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 131–38. 78. Perry, Division, p. 44. 79. CN iii, 3934. 80. De Quincey, Works, iii, 115. 81. Following Coburn’s suggestion in CN iii, 3934n. 82. I take some of the following information from Coburn’s note. 83. See CN iii, 3861 and n. for Coleridge’s admiration of Ficino and use of this work. 84. The Bipont editors made some improvements to this text, but still came in for criticism: see Moss, p. 427. 85. Coleridge would have discovered later that the authenticity of Timaeus Locrus and Ocellus Lucanus had been decisively questioned: see Tennemann, i, 76–77. 86. BL i, 15–16, 144–46. 87. CN iii, 3778, 3780. 88. I guess this date on the basis of CN iii, 4337, discussed on p. 66, below. 89. CL i, 260, quoted at the beginning of this chapter. 90. CL ii, 866. Three critics make this surmise: Ronald C. Wendling, ‘Coleridge’s Critical Sympathy with Plato’, Coleridge Bulletin, 16 (Winter 2000), 115–22 (p. 117n.); Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1800–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 167; George Whalley, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Library Cormorant’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, 1950) — cited by Wu. Further, according to Coburn, Coleridge owned the Opera Omnia (Paris, 1578) with Stephanus’ Greek text and Serranus’ Latin: CN i, 204n., 937I.n. 91. CM iv, 139. 92. Both reprinted in Thomas Taylor the Platonist, from which I take the details of Taylor’s publications. 93. Sometime prior to 1810, according to Wu (p. 167). 94. CM iv, 140. 95. CN iii, 3935. 96. CN iii, 3935.

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97. Arthur H. Nethercot, The Road to Tryermaine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), p. 105, cites a letter to Lady Beaumont (CL iii, 279) which refers to Taylor’s translation of the Platonic Theology of Proclus, ‘so translated that difficult Greek is translated into incomprehensible English’. Nethercot says: ‘The obvious conclusion is that Coleridge owned or had access to his own copies of the works in fifth-century Greek and that he was comparing them with Taylor’s renderings as they were published’. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley make a similar assumption (CM iv, 4744) without citing evidence. This is really unprovable one way or the other. 98. CM iv, 141; he would later receive a copy of Proclus from J. H. Green: see Chapter 5, below. 99. Haven makes the distinction: ‘Certainly [Coleridge] was not like Thomas Taylor merely repeating to a rationalist age the words of visionary philosophers of the past’: Patterns of Con­ sciousness: An Essay on Coleridge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1969), p. 110. 100. Thomas Taylor the Platonist, p. 160. 101. Kathleen Raine, ‘Thomas Taylor, Platonism and the English Romantics’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968), 99–123. Blake caricatures Taylor as Sipsop the Pythagorean in An Island in the Moon. How much use Shelley made of Taylor is uncertain, but for a good guess see Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 75–76. 102. CM iv, 160. 103. Edinburgh Review, 14 (April 1809), 187–211, p. 190. The attribution to James Mill is noted in Thomas Taylor the Platonist, p. 535. 104. Peter Russell calls this ‘a patent lie’: ‘Shelley, Plato and Thomas Taylor’, in Shelley 1792–1992, ed. by James Hogg (Salzburg: Mellen, 1993), pp. 148–69 (p. 163). 105. Edinburgh Review, 14, p. 201. 106. CM iv, 156. 107. Edinburgh Review, 14, p. 193. 108. In Notopoulos, p. 378. 109. Wallace, p. 13. 110. Thomas Taylor the Platonist, pp. 54–55. 111. Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A., 2 vols ( John Murray: London, 1897), ii, 7. On the Victorian anglicizing of Plato see R. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp. 247–48. 112. CN ii, 2598. 113. ‘Coleridge’, p. 69. Cf. Ronald C. Wendling, ‘Pater, Coleridge, and the Return of the Platonic’, Wordsworth Circle, 30.2 (Spring 1999), 94–99. 114. Opus, p. 196. 115. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter Conradi (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 12; cf. p. 388.

Chapter 2

v

Coleridge’s Kant Preparer and Opponent of Platonism The story of Coleridge’s reception of Plato which I have told in Chapter 1 would be only half complete without a parallel consideration of his reception of Kant, since the two were in Coleridge’s mind inseparable. If the Greek writer ‘dazzled’ Coleridge with his imagery and philosophical mythology, the German (he relates) ‘took possession of me as with a giant’s hand’ owing to his rigour of thought, his ‘adamantine chain’ of logic.1 And given Coleridge’s view of the shape of philosophical history, it was natural for him to associate these two foundational figures with each other, notwithstanding the distance in time and temperament between them. In contrast and partly in reaction to Priestley’s assertion of the onward march of enlightened thought, Coleridge came to approach the history of philosophy as circular rather than linear, such that the positions adopted by ancient and modern philosophers could be essentially the same. The following scheme, scribbled in the margin of Proclus, though surely not intended as fixed dogma, is nevertheless representative in showing how he saw the twofold genesis of idealist philosophy: It seems clear, that the Critical Philosophy, as contained in the works of Immanuel Kantius, is a junction of the Stoic Moral with the Platonic Dialectic: which Kant has unfairly confounded with the Sophistic (Logik der Schein) but which is in truth the same with his own transcendental Logic: even as the Mathesis of Plato, so finely determined in this chapter by Proclus, is Kant’s transcendental Æsthetic (intuitus puri). The Wissenschaftslehre of Fichte and Schelling is pura puta the Alexandrine Philosophy — Fichte being to Kant, & Schelling to Fichte, as Plotinus to Plato, and Proclus to Plotinus. — Kant = Plato+ Zeno Fichte = Plotinus Schelling = Proclus.2

I will explore this circular model in Chapter 4; here I simply want to note how it enabled Coleridge to read Plato through Kant, and vice versa. In the Notebooks, references to Plato and Kant tend to cluster together. Initial traces of Kantian thought can be seen in the philosophical letters to Josiah Wedgewood in 1801, in which Coleridge interprets Plato’s Ideas as the ‘original Faculties & Tendencies of the mind, the internal Organs, as it were, and Laws of human Thinking’, suggesting that the translation should be ‘Moulds’ rather than ‘Forms’.3 This terminology

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sounds reminiscent of Kant’s ‘categories’, and as Orsini points out, the association stuck: Coleridge uses the word ‘Moulds’ for Kant’s categories several times in the future.4 In the present chapter I explore Coleridge’s mediation of the Kantian Critical Philosophy, and his Platonic transformation of it based on post-Kantian debates. I begin from the unfavourable conditions that any attempt to champion Kant encountered in England in the early nineteenth century: this context illuminates Coleridge’s eccentric method of conveying Kantian thought, which I address in the second section. In the third section I consider Coleridge’s interpretations of Kant, with particular reference to the doctrine of Ideas: Coleridge saw Kant and Plato as substantially aligned, but as differing on the ‘highest problem’ of philosophy, i.e. whether the Ideas are regulative or constitutive. In the fourth section I compare the German Romantic turn to Plato, by way of showing Coleridge’s eclectic approach involved taking up available possibilities rather than lapsing (as is sometimes suggested) into an anachronistic philosophy of faith. Finally, the debate regarding regu­lative or constitutive Ideas impacts directly on the question of what kind of language is appropriate to philosophical writing; I thus conclude with Kant’s criticism of Plato’s mystical language, and the difficult but fruitful dilemma with which this presented Coleridge. ‘The Most Unintelligible Emanuel Kant’ The reception of Kant in England during Coleridge’s lifetime occurred in two phases, neither of which conduced to balanced comprehension of his philosophy. There was considerable interest among political radicals in the 1790s, especially from 1795 to 1798; but thereafter few (except Henry Crabb Robinson and Cole­ ridge) had anything to say in Kant’s favour, until De Quincey’s brief articles in the 1820s. In Leask’s words, ‘Kantian philosophy appears to have made the leap from a marginal illuminism to a marginal absolutism without ever having come to rest in the centre’.5 Before his trip to Germany (September 1798–July 1799), Coleridge expresses curiosity about ‘Kant, the great german Metaphysician’, while referring con­ ventionally enough to ‘the most unintelligible Emanuel Kant’.6 He might have derived the latter opinion from periodical articles on Kant, of which the first known may be cited as typical: the reviewer (Benjamin Sowden) offers a fair summary of Kant given the limits of a brief article, but concludes that Kant’s system is ‘a mass of obscurity and confusion, which instead of assisting the mind in the acquisition of true science, tends to sink it in doubt and scepticism’.7 The association of Kant (and to a large extent all things German) with obscurity, scepticism, atheism, and hence revolution, was the keynote of his early reception in England. Those writers who did attempt a sympathetic mediation of Kant were exclusively radicals, often writing for periodicals run by the dissenting publisher Joseph Johnson: The Analytical Review and afterwards the Monthly Magazine. This radical interest helps to account for Coleridge’s pre-Göttingen curiosity. It may even be that Coleridge mentioned the unintelligibility of Kant by way

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37

of teasing his correspondent, the revolutionary Thelwall, who was a member of Friedrich Nitsch’s Kantian Society in London.8 Nitsch, like the Irish radical J. A. O’Keefe, derived his synopses of Kant largely from the Popularphilosoph Reinhold, who, though no radical himself, did emphasize the political potential of Kant’s programme for humanity.9 Kant’s call in ‘Beantwortung der Frage “Was ist Auf klärung?” ’ [An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’] to both individual and collective cultivation of reason, rather than blind faith, was a central text in this movement. Thomas Beddoes, another early inf luence on Coleridge, favourably reviewed Kant’s ‘Zum ewigen Frieden’ [Towards Eternal Peace], quoting Kant’s concluding maxim, ‘All maxims that require publicity, in order not to fail of their end, coincide at once with policy and justice’:10 a message that could have attracted the Coleridge of the 1795 Lectures. When two new books on Kant appeared shortly afterwards,11 it might have seemed that Kant’s cause was strengthening; but these works fell dead-born from the press. This was because the political climate had turned quickly and decisively against the radicals. Johnson, the enabler of much of the Kantian literature, was imprisoned for sedition in 1798.12 Between 1798 and 1799, nineteen translations of Kant’s writings, mostly on religion, philosophy of history, and political philosophy, were published — nominally in London (as Essays and Treatises). But they were printed in Saxony, and owing to the war, few copies could reach England: so after a single review, the translator, John Richardson, was forgotten.13 Coleridge is unlikely to have been aware of this, but he was distinctly aware of the bitter campaign by the government-sponsored Anti-Jacobin Review (founded July 1798) against all radical intellectual activity. One source in particular, whom Micheli identifies as probably James Walker, then resident in Weimar, pilloried German universities as ludicrous, dangerous, and atheistic. Thus it was reported that the students at Jena are ‘almost to a man, republicans [. . .] all formed into secret clubs’, the ‘scenes of perpetual [. . .] riots’. They are abetted by atheistic professors, at the head of whom, ‘pre-eminent in infamy, stands Furchte [sic!], professor of philosophy, or, rather of philosophism’.14 Some such opinion of Fichte’s Jena was admittedly expressed by certain German writers too; but the effect of these reports in England, where readers could not differentiate Kant from Fichte or Herder, was to reinforce blanket prejudice. Defending traditional English universities against their German counterparts, Walker writes that the English students he had met at Göttingen had all converted to the new metaphysics and had consequently ‘lost every sense of delicacy, every notion of morality and religion, and every emotion of patriotism’.15 He rounds on the paradigmatically unpatriotic Wordsworth and Coleridge: having failed to set up a libertine commune elsewhere, he claims, they naturally turned to Germany. This was one of Coleridge’s early experiences of trial by review: one of the associates of the twin-bards [. . .] was, not long since, at the University of Göttingen, where he has passed a considerable time with another Englishman, ejusdem farinae, for the express purpose of becoming an adept in the mysteries of philosophism, and of qualifying himself for the task of translating such of the favourite productions of the German school as are the best calculated to facilitate the eradication of British prejudices.16

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Kant as Preparer and Opponent of Platonism

Such sneering was effective in driving English interest in Kant underground for some time, and thus began the second phase of the English reception of Kant: virtual ignorance with the exceptions of Coleridge and Crabb Robinson.17 The Monthly Register, in which Robinson published the first three of his outstanding introductory articles on Kant, had a limited circulation and all too brief a life span. The English Review and Analytical Review first amalgamated, then dissolved; the Critical Review, Monthly Review, and Monthly Mirror diminished their attention to German literature. Only the Monthly Magazine remained both unwaveringly radical and successful, yet increasingly concentrated on politics to the exclusion of literature.18 General disfavour or indifference toward German culture around this time is ref lected by the collapse after just a year and a half (in June 1801) of a periodical designed for its diffusion, The German Museum.19 Meanwhile, it appears that during his year in Germany, Coleridge felt the excitement of Kantianism without yet studying its source.20 He reports that the elderly poet Klopstock believes Kant an ‘unintelligible jargonist’ whose fame would soon wane, and yet Coleridge is puzzled by this prediction, for ‘all are Kantians whom I have met with’.21 His letters mention having brought back a box of metaphysical books on his return to England.22 Moreover, annotating Kant’s Logik many years later, he recollects having once owned a precursor to that volume: Before I left Germany in 1799, I procured from the Nachdrücker or privileged Book-pirates a thin Octavo of two or at most 3 Sheets, under the name of Kant’s Logic — doubtless, published by, or from the Notes of, one of his Lecture-pupils.23

This underground activity testifies both to the liveliness of the German milieu and to Coleridge’s interest in it. His serious study of Kant probably began a couple of years later, the feverish urgency of which is evident in the famous letter to Poole proclaiming that he has ‘completely extricated the notions of time and space’ and referring grandly to ‘my predecessors from Aristotle to Kant’.24 Making Kant Intelligible: The Problem of Language Writing in 1823, De Quincey opined rather grudgingly that Coleridge had been the only capable anglophone mediator of Kant’s philosophy to date. Yet Coleridge, despite declaring, ‘To me it will be happiness and honor enough, should I succeed in rendering [Kant’s] system [. . .] intelligible to my countrymen’,25 undertook the task of ‘explaining metaphysics to the nation’ in what readers felt to be a puzzlingly eccentric manner: as Byron chuckled, ‘I wish he would explain his explanation’.26 De Quincey followed contemporary reviewers of the Biographia in lamenting Coleridge’s ‘Delphic obscurity’,27 and this complaint has been echoed ever since: one recent writer regrets his attempt to infuse Kantian philosophy into literary criticism, since ‘[a]s the technical chapters of Coleridge’s Biographia demonstrate only too fully, arcane vocabulary and technical obscurity seem the necessary tools — and mysteries — of such an expert’.28 What the earlier complainants could not know, however, was that Coleridge did in fact deal with Kantian matter in a straightforward and relatively systematic way, in his manuscript Logic.29 There is

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39

a palpable difference in Coleridge’s manner when writing for the ‘reading public’ from those manuscripts of which Sara Coleridge observed, with an insider’s knowledge, ‘the fear of the press is not in them’.30 I have dwelt on the unfavourable context for Kantian thought in England, because this, though it does not explain Coleridge’s explanation, does help to explain why it took the complex form it did. Rosemary Ashton surmises that in his published writing Coleridge sometimes omits to mention debts to German writers in general and Kant in particular because the popular assumption was that they were obscure, morally dangerous, or both.31 As Coleridge wrote as late as 1820, ‘our most sensible men look at the German Muses thro’ a film of prejudice & utter misconception’.32 This observation helps us to see that a number of Coleridge’s Kantian references in the Biographia were pertinent to their time. First, Coleridge’s reference to the activity of ‘Reviewers and Frenchmen’ in obfuscating the ‘clearness and evidence’ of Kant’s philosophy almost certainly has in mind specific targets: Robert Morrison identifies the reviewer as Thomas Brown and the Frenchman as Charles de Villers.33 I suspect Coleridge also alludes to Madame de Staël, whose De l’Allemagne enjoyed great success in England in Francis Hodgson’s translation of 1813. Staël’s inf luential presentation of Kant owes something to what she learned from Crabb Robinson’s private lectures in Weimar in 1804,34 and Coleridge might well have approved of its polemical slant against Anglo-French empiricism; but he would surely have considered that Staël made too many concessions to popular readability. Previous to De l’Allemagne, however, the ‘chief source of popular knowledge on Kant’ (according to Wellek) was indeed Brown’s long review of Villers’ Philosophie de Kant (Metz, 1801). Brown admits to not having read Kant at first hand, and Villers’s popular-level exposition anyway errs fundamentally in reading Kant in psychological as opposed to logical terms — assuming, that is, that Kant is discussing particular cognitions, rather than the conditions for the possibility of cognitions.35 So Brown’s devastating review is directed against a phantom-Kant. He attacks Kant’s ‘cumbrous superf luity of nomenclature’, dismisses his system as ‘incoherent and feeble’, and ridicules Villers’s own obscurity and evasion.36 It has recently been argued that, in alluding to Brown, Coleridge was obscuring the true, viz. 1790s radical, reception history of Kant, in the service of the conservative rewriting of his own past allegiances. It is further suggested that Biographia’s alignment of Kant with English writers of the seventeenth century (and by extension with Plato) tactically pushes Kant into a transhistorical, non-revolutionary realm.37 Undeniable though this trajectory of Coleridge’s thought may be, however, Brown’s prominence was such that rebutting his review can hardly be considered a def lection. Secondly, and a further point of defence for Coleridge’s political acumen, he is accurately sensitive to the political conditions in which Kant operated. Tacitly comparing his own experience of a hostile political environment, Coleridge writes of Kant’s ‘imminent danger of persecution’ in Prussia, which probably led Kant to dissemble some of his more Fichtean conclusions. Although Wellek feels that Coleridge exaggerates this danger of persecution, it is true that Kant feared it, and even submitted to censorship. By 1786 ‘Kant was gaining a reputation [. . .] as an

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Kant as Preparer and Opponent of Platonism

atheist. He himself was reported to have feared that he could lose his position. Indeed, his Critique of Pure Reason was becoming notorious’.38 Friedrich Wilhelm II, whose government Coleridge aptly describes as ‘that strange compound of lawless debauchery, and priest-ridden superstition’, initially favoured Kant, but soon found him inimical to his crusade for piety, threatening him with ‘unpleasant measures’ following the publication of Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1793).39 The elderly Kant submitted, and promised to stop discoursing on religion altogether; with Wilhelm’s death in 1797 he was again free to publish, yet as Coleridge mentions, Fichte was expelled from Jena on a charge of atheism (1798). Coleridge reasonably concludes that ‘the venerable old man’s caution was not groundless’.40 One recent endorsement of this argument of Coleridge’s appears in Frederick Beiser’s suggestion that Kant introduces religious doctrines at a point in the first Critique where they seemed to do least ‘harm’, in order to pre-empt censorship and allow Kant to make the more pressing argument for freedom of speech; Beiser refers to this as Kant’s ‘compromise with the status quo’.41 Coleridge’s detection of a thoroughgoing esoteric method in Kant is therefore not quite as eccentric as it appears at first sight — but more on this below. A third pertinent point in Biographia regards Kant’s concept of the a priori, which Coleridge says has ‘an absurdity burthened on it’.42 This was certainly the case, considering the account of Kant given by one apparently respectable source, William Drummond’s Academical Questions. Travestying Kant as the peddler of the old doctrine of ‘innate ideas’ which Locke had long since exploded, Drummond sums up: The votaries of the new metaphysics are, in their own language, the interpreters of the transcendental philosophy, who unfold the mysteries of their science, not by the aid of empiricism, but of criticism; who contemplate the laws of nature in visions of pure reason; and who deduce truth from anticipated cognitions à priori.

Again: ‘Anticipation, then, is the basis of the philosophy which is called, and which is not, new’.43 Coleridge was making an important correction to this prevalent misreading when he explained:44 By knowledge, a priori, we do not mean, that we can know any thing previously to experience, which would be a contradiction in terms; but that having once known it by occasion of experience (i.e. something acting upon us from without) we then know, that it must have pre-existed, or the experience itself would have been impossible.

Coleridge continues with a favourite illustration: ‘By experience only I know, that I have eyes; but then my reason convinces me, that I must have had eyes in order to the experience’.45 The a priori, for Kant and Coleridge, is that without which experience could not take place: it is logically presupposed by experience, not (as Drummond assumed) temporally prior to it. This was key to what Coleridge considered a great service performed by the Critique of Pure Reason (i.e. the first Critique): the subordination of Lockean empiricism. The first Critique elaborated the response of Leibniz to the empiricist assertion that there is nothing in the mind (‘intellectus’) that does not come through the senses. Leibniz replied, ‘with the exception of the mind itself ’: and Coleridge was fond of quoting this response.46

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Kant’s assertion of the active nature of mind decisively countered the empiricist teaching which Coleridge summed up as ‘consciousness considered as a result’ of mere mechanical processes.47 Orsini objects to the term ‘pre-existed’ in Coleridge’s definition of the a priori, as making it ‘almost’ chronologically prior after all.48 Coleridge clearly understood the importance of this distinction, but it seems that he wanted to use the temporal sense metaphorically, as a way of figuring the logical. I think an explanation for this may be found in another context: Coleridge’s commentary on Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’. Coleridge praises the mysteriousness of this poem, which touches the ‘depths’ of the mind: the poem is intended for readers who are accustomed [. . .] to feel a deep interest in modes of inward being, to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed, save in symbols of time and space. For such readers the sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge Mr. Wordsworth with believing the platonic pre-existence in the ordinary interpretation of the words, as I am to believe, that Plato himself ever meant or taught it.49

Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, Coleridge implies, contains a deep psychological truth, which should admittedly not be reified into the doctrine of ‘innate ideas’ (Coleridge considered this doctrine a straw-man set up by Locke, and wished that Kant had been present at that time to elucidate the true a priori50), but can be played with poetically in concepts of anticipation.51 The exceptionable Platonic term ‘preexisted’, that is to say, embodies Coleridge’s acknowledgement that language is tied to the corporeal world, and hence naturally obstructive in denoting the noncorporeal: given the inherent limitations of our cognitive apparatus, symbols of time and space are unavoidable in discourse about the non-spatial and non-temporal. The use of the metaphor ‘deep’ to describe a poem would itself be an example of this. Coleridge’s sense of the cardinal importance of establishing the true nature of space and time helps to explain his partiality, surprising from a modern perspective, for Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligiblis forma et principiis [On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World].52 He claims that this work ‘contains all the main principles of ’ the first Critique, ‘and often more perspicuously expressed’. Coleridge ponders why the Latin dissertation had ‘no sensible effect upon the Philosophic Public’, whereas at the publication of the first Critique ‘the universities of Germany exploded’; he recommends that ‘the former work should always be studied and mastered previously to the study of the Critique d.r.V.& the works that followed it’, it being a ‘better auxiliary’ than all the commentaries by Reinhold and others.53 It is true that Coleridge’s view of its merit was not eccentric, since Kant himself regarded it as marking the end of his ‘precritical period’ and the beginning of his ‘critical philosophy’: hence his request for the Dissertation’s inclusion in the collection Vermischte Schriften (which Coleridge annotated).54 Further, a major practical point in its favour for Coleridge when he began his Kantian studies would have been its Latin language. But above all the work was helpful to Coleridge in containing a clear statement on time and space, and with it an apparently strong Platonic dualism between the earthly world

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and the world of ideas: as Beiser notes, ‘Kant makes a firm distinction between the sensible and the intellectual; and he thinks that it is possible for reason alone to give us insight into the noumenal realm’.55 In attempting to restore ‘the noblest enterprise of antiquity’ Kant refers specifically to Plato.56 For it was of great significance for Coleridge that (in Lovejoy’s words) ‘Kant, not less than Plato, was a philosopher who believed in two worlds, or realms of being, corresponding to the two “faculties” of knowledge, the Understanding and the Reason’.57 As we will see below, Coleridge came to use Plato’s doctrine of Ideas in an attempt to overcome precisely that dualism; here I only want to note that Coleridge’s troubled physical and mental experience (recorded for instance in ‘Dejection: An Ode’) indeed often encouraged him to think in terms of the human being as determined in the physical world, but a free agent in the noumenal. And the problem of language in trying to span the two appears throughout these speculations: recurring to the quotation about ‘symbols’ in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, we can note that for Coleridge, language is problematic in being tied to physical significations, yet capable of being raised up, when used symbolically, to engage the noumenal realm. Hence the fact that the problem of ‘the communication of truth’ impinges whenever Coleridge attempts to set Kantian thought in writing. In one Notebook entry, a Trinitarian meditation on time and space, these problems come into sharp focus. Coleridge begins demonstratively, asserting that although a thing cannot be one and three at the same time, God is not in time, and therefore can be conceived without logical contradiction as a Trinity. He dismisses the notion of space as ‘a receptaculum reale inane’ (similar to Kant’s phrase in the Dissertation, ‘absolutum et immensum rerum possibilium receptaculum’ [boundless receptacle of possible things]).58 However, since our cognition takes place exclusively within the pure forms of perception, i.e. space and time, we cannot speak about God who transcends these categories. Thus lost for words, as it were, Coleridge exclaims exasperatedly against verbal demonstrations: O! the truly religious man when he is not conveying his feelings & beliefs to other men, and does not need the medium of words, O! how little does he find in his religious sense either of form or of number — it is the Infinite!’59

Giving up on the attempted demonstration of the Trinity, Coleridge hangs on to the problem of ‘the medium of words’: But we are too social — we become in a sort Idolators — for the means, we are obliged to use to excite notions of Truth in the minds of others or our own, we by witchcraft of slothful association, impose on ourselves for the Truths themselves — .60

Coleridge, like Kant in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, sees Idols and Ideas as a kind of polarity: Idols belong to the physical world (as Bacon revealed), Ideas to the noumenal world (as Plato expounded).61 That cry in mid-argument — ‘But we are too social!’ — perhaps ref lects the fact that Kant himself is in many respects so little a social philosopher.62 Adorno argued that Kant’s two-world doctrine, as embodied in the third antinomy (i.e. proving that we are both free and unfree), was the inevitable argument of

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bourgeois thought, struggling to explain the mechanics of the marketplace while keeping an internal refuge for the beleaguered mind. Dubious though this might be as a criticism of Kant’s logic,63 the spirit of Adorno’s comment is nicely illustrated by the continuation of Coleridge’s entry, in which emotional intensity is signalled by a rhythm of near-pentameter: Our intellectual Bank stops payment — & we pass an act by acclamation that hereafter the Paper promises shall be the Gold & Silver itself — and ridicule a man for a dreamer, and reviver of antiquated Dreams, who believes that Gold & Silver exist. — This may do as well in the market — but O! for the universal, for the man himself, the difference is woful!64

Coleridge’s language associates the rise of commerce with the decline of metaphysics; he was to complain similarly in Logic that there are ‘terms which we are obliged to use in philosophic disquisition, and which yet we cannot use without awakening the meanings engrafted on them by the market’.65 A system of paper promises — textbooks, paraphrases — might give the consumer of philosophy the pleasant illusion of knowledge, but the consumer might answer like Hamlet: What do you read? Words, words, words. Not only does Coleridge fear that, while promising gold, he may deliver paper, but also that he will then impose the same upon himself. It is easy enough to live on intellectual credit, and talk ‘like a man of sense’, but this results in inner impoverishment.66 Kant, for all the political discomfort he faced, enjoyed an advantage in Coleridge’s eyes: like the English Platonists of the seventeenth century, he was able to write learnedly for the learned, free from the necessity of submitting his work to that abstract monstrosity, a ‘philosophic public’. That Coleridge was all too keenly aware that the conditions in which Kant’s critical philosophy f lourished in Germany were absent in England is evident from this marginale to Kant’s Logic: ‘the old Logicians, Philologists and Philosophers’ were much more happily placed than their modern counterparts, in that they had either to ground the pupil’s mind on the appropriate import & use of terms, or might safely presume on readers so grounded by others — . The Self- conceit of well-cloathed Sciolism and the consequent only not universal abuse & laxity of words, they had not to struggle with — .67

The fear of paper promises in philosophical writing leads Coleridge to indirectness and an inclination to the esoteric in his mediation of Kant. Platonizing the First Critique: Constitutive Ideas Not only did Coleridge feel constrained to mediate Kantian matter for a supposedly ignorant and gossipy reading public in an indirect manner, but to complicate matters further, he was at the same time trying to unfold what he considered to be esoteric hints in Kant’s works themselves. The first Critique draws the distinction between Understanding (Verstand) and Reason (Vernunft), which was to underpin works of Coleridge such as the 1819 Friend and Aids to Reflection. Understanding, in Kant’s account, operates according to the ‘Categories’ to process sense-data; whereas Reason, operating in the noumenal realm, deals with that

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which is necessary and universal. Kant attempted to end the disputes of traditional metaphysics by delineating exactly what kind of knowledge the faculties of Reason and Understanding are capable of supplying. Kant insists that this determination of the boundaries of human knowledge was the most important of all the means to struggle against sophism and promote enlightenment. In this respect Kant places himself in the tradition of Socrates (differentiated from Plato, whom he believes to have slipped back into sophistical dialectic): a systematic critique of reason has the great advantage, writes Kant, ‘allen Einwürfen wider Sittlichkeit und Religion auf sokratische Art, nämlich durch den klärsten Beweis der Unwissenheit der Gegner, auf alle künftige Zeit ein Ende zu machen’ [of putting an end for all future time to objections against religion and morality in a Socratic way, namely by the clearest proof of the ignorance of the opponent].68 Coleridge acknowledged the decisive importance of this ‘Copernican Revolution’, noting that the otherwise comparable work of the Cambridge Platonists suffers from the lack of such a propaedeutic.69 Yet he rejects the boundaries Kant actually set: for being steeped in Plato’s dialectic and in post-Kantian idealism, he could not rest content with what he aptly referred to as Kant’s ‘modest humility with regard to the powers of the intellect’.70 I want now to draw together five interrelated criticisms that Coleridge makes of the first Critique, suggesting that Coleridge turns to Plato’s doctrine of Ideas for the criticism (number ‘v’ in my list) that leads and sums up all the others. (i) Kant posits the existence of a noumenal ‘Ding-an-sich’ [thing-in-itself ] beyond all perceptual phenomena, but insists that this is unknowable.71 Coleridge, however, suggests that Kant meant more by the Ding-an-sich ‘than his mere words express’ — an example of his refusing to take paper promises when he believed gold and silver were to be had.72 To attribute an esoteric method to Kant appears capricious, but it was not a Coleridgean aberration. It was Schelling who wrote: ‘Ich glaube aber, daß das, was Kant von Dingen an sich sagt, sich schlechterdings nicht anders, denn nur aus seinem durchgängig beobachteten Herablassungssystem erklären lässt’ [I believe, however, that what Kant says about things in themselves cannot be otherwise explained than by his consistently observed system of condescension].73 And Coleridge suggests much the same, seeing in the obscurer parts of the first Critique ‘hints and insinuations referring to ideas, which Kant either did not think it prudent to avow’ (a reference to the fear of political oppression, discussed above), ‘or which he considered as consistently left behind in a pure analysis, not of human nature in toto, but of the speculative intellect alone’.74 The Schellingian-Coleridgean notion of a ‘general system of condescension’ in Kant is mere ‘foppery’ according to De Quincey, and in Wellek’s view nothing short of ‘monstrous’;75 but I shall suggest below that it has more foundation than that stern critic allows. Certainly Coleridge, who viewed esoteric doctrines as normal and necessary, intended no detraction from Kant in this respect. In Logic, Coleridge admits the existence of things-in-themselves, and agrees with Kant that logic cannot reach them — that is, they are not objects of the Understanding. The hint Coleridge would take from Kant is to conf late them with the Platonic Ideas, and make them the objects of intellectual intuition.76

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(ii) To claim that there exist things-in-themselves but that they are unknowable is to claim that our intuitions (Kant’s ‘Anschauungen’, a word for which Coleridge repeatedly tried to construct an English equivalent77) are sensuous only — that we do not have intellectual intuitions. In keeping with his dissension from the doctrine of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself, however, and again like Fichte and Schelling, Coleridge disagrees. He notes that since Kant takes the word ‘intuition’ to refer exclusively to ‘that which can be represented in space and time’, the Sage of Königsberg is quite consistent to deny the possibility of intellectual intuitions. Yet Coleridge himself ‘reverted’ to the ‘wider signification’ of the word, ‘authorized by our elder theologians and metaphysicians according to whom the term comprehends all truths known to us without a medium’.78 This redefinition at once transgresses Kant’s boundary of possible knowledge, and re-opens the Platonic tradition reaching back to dialogues such as Phaedrus, in which the pre-existent soul beholds nourishing and life-giving ideal forms. Coleridge states the same position in different terms when he defines Reason ‘with Jacobi’ as an organ bearing the same relation to spiritual objects, the Universal, the Eternal, and the Necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phenomena. But then it must be added, that it is an organ identical with its appropriate objects. Thus God, the Soul, eternal Truth, &c. are the objects of Reason; but they are themselves reason.79

This is precisely the mystical knowledge of which Kant denied the possibility, although the mysterious status of his Ding-an-sich had left the way open to such Plato-conscious interpretations. (iii) Kant demonstrates in the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ that traditional metaphysical debates reach an impasse in the form of the ‘paralogisms’ and ‘antinomies’. Logical analysis, that is, can equally prove and disprove, among others, the four cardinal propositions of metaphysics: the eternity of the world, the immortality of the soul, the freedom of the Will, and the existence of God. Coleridge, however, consistently with his exaltation of Reason as an organ of spiritual sense, interpreted the antinomies as pointing to a ‘higher logic’. Coleridge believed that Kant’s antinomies proved only that the logic of the Understanding cannot resolve these questions. The intellectual intuition of Reason, however, does provide the soughtafter knowledge.80 Coleridge effectively summarizes his dissent from Kant’s caution about the bounds of human knowledge in questioning the correctness of the title, Critique of Pure Reason. This work, according to Coleridge, ‘would have been open to fewer objections, had it been proposed by the author under the more appropriate name of “Transcendental Logic” ’, since the Critique consists mainly in a transcendental analysis of ‘logic itself (that is, the forms of the understanding and the rules grounded on the same)’.81 Coleridge thus suggests that the first Critique, despite containing the word ‘Reason’ in the title, in fact only treats the Understanding, whilst hinting at a subsequent discourse on Reason that Kant never wrote. Connecting this with Coleridge’s detection of esoteric ‘hints and insinuations’ in Kant, it is possible to see how Coleridge might have regarded his own Logic as a faithful exposition of

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Kant’s critique of Understanding, whilst the sequel, the esoteric Opus Maximum, corresponded to the true critique of pure Reason to which Kant declined to ascend. (iv) The first Critique introduces the key doctrine of the transcendental unity of apperception, but does not develop it. Coleridge, however, followed the postKantians’ development of it, making it foundational for his whole aspiration to philosophical system-building. Coleridge confessed that ‘the chapter on original apperception’ ‘remained obscure’ to him even after repeated perusals. It is bound up with the question of how it is possible for experience to occur, i.e. how the perceiving subject can coalesce with the perceived object, the question which Coleridge at least for a time felt to be ‘a perpetual and unmoving cloud of darkness’ over the first Critique.82 (Likewise Fichte regarded the question ‘wie ist Erfahrung möglich’ [how is experience possible?] as the basic question of philosophy.83) Despite his struggles, though, it is clear that Coleridge early and firmly grasped the significance of this doctrine.84 Embarking on the transcendental deduction of the Categories of the Understanding, Kant rather abruptly announces the principle upon which everything else is now shown to depend: the act of self-consciousness, or the ‘Ich denke’ [I think].85 Kant’s expository term for this self-consciousness is ‘transzcendentale Einheit der Apperception’ [transcendental unity of apperception]. It is transcendental, because it is the a priori condition of all experience; a unity, because there is only one I, or centre of consciousness; a unity of apperception, since by apperception Kant means self-consciousness.86 Apperception is an ‘Actus’ [act], which necessarily accompanies all representations of objects: I cannot perceive an object without simultaneously being conscious of myself.87 Although Kant abstains from further speculation on this topic, as potentially leading back into the metaphysics he was trying to exclude, Fichte and Schelling pursued the notion of apperception as an act with relentless vigour: the ‘Ich denke’ inevitably evolved into the Absolute of Schelling, as expounded in Coleridge’s Ten Theses in Biographia chapter ten. Coleridge makes the primal ‘I AM’ a ‘spirit’ (translating the word ‘Geist’ as Schelling used it in his early work), arguing further that this must be a Will: the spirit (originally the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this identity, in order to be conscious of it: fit alter et idem. But this implies an act, and it follows therefore that intelligence or self-consciousness is impossible, except by and in a will. The self-conscious spirit therefore is a will.88

In his later works, such as Aids to Reflection and the Opus Maximum, composed after he had expressed quite decisive dissatisfaction with Schelling, Coleridge ap­proaches the Will in moral terms, asserting that conscience is ontologically prior to consciousness, and so making the moral law primal for humanity.89 This repre­sented a considerable development from Coleridge’s first struggles with Kant’s ethics, when he thought Kant a ‘wretched psychologist’ and dismissed the Categorical Imperative as a ‘mere empty generalisation’;90 and it could thus be said that for Coleridge, Kant’s Categorical Imperative came to displace the emphasis on the transcendental unity of apperception as developed by Fichte and then Schelling. As I hope the very rough genealogy just sketched has suggested, however, these two

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strands of thought coincide: the Will of the later Coleridge is both epistemologically foundational, and a moral fact of which we are as rational agents immediately aware — and he would have regarded these dual propositions as a unified development, not a distortion, of the ‘hints and insinuations’ of Kant. (v) Coleridge’s most direct criticism of Kant is made persistently through Plato: whereas Kant holds that the Ideas are regulative, Coleridge’s Plato holds them to be constitutive. Coleridge explains his terminology most concisely in a relatively early work, The Statesman’s Manual (1816). An Idea is not a notion, which is ‘abstracted from the forms of the Understanding’, for: A Notion may be realized, and becomes Cognition; but that which is neither a Sensation or a Perception, that which is neither individual (i.e. a sensible Intuition) nor general (i.e. a conception) which neither refers to outward Facts nor yet is abstracted from the FORMS of perception contained in the Understanding; but which is an educt of the Imagination actuated by the pure Reason, to which there neither is or can be an adequate correspondent in the world of the senses — this and this alone is = AN IDEA. Whether Ideas are regulative only, according to Aristotle and Kant; or likewise CONSTITUTIVE, and one with the power and Life of Nature, according to Plato, and Plotinus (ἐν λόγῳ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων) is the highest problem of Philosophy, and not part of its nomenclature.91

This passage takes its cue from Kant, who at the outset of the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ in the first Critique defines his concept of ‘Idee’ [Idea] against Plato, and explicitly aligns himself with Aristotle.92 Kant refers to Plato as ‘der erhabene Philosoph’ [the sublime philosopher], which cannot be an entirely ironic epithet, and to a certain extent expounds him sympathetically. He deprecates Brucker’s literalminded ridicule of the insistence in Plato’s Republic that a prince must participate in the Ideas in order to govern well: instead, according to Kant, Plato has shown that ‘[e]ine Verfassung von der größten menschlichen Freyheit nach Gesetzen, welche machen, daß jedes Freyheit mit der andern ihrer zusammen bestehen kann, [. . .] ist doch wenigstens eine nothwendige Idee’ [a constitution providing for the greatest human freedom according to laws that permit the freedom of each to exist together with that of others [. . .] is at least a necessary idea].93 Such an Idea should function as an archetype, which will never be fulfilled in reality, but can be used to bring legislation ‘ever nearer’ to the greatest possible perfection. One can see how Kant and Plato harmonized usefully for Coleridge’s polemic against the ‘mechanic philosophy’, when Kant writes: Plato bemerkte sehr wohl, daß unsere Erkenntnißkraft ein weit höheres Bedürfniß fühle, als bloß Erscheinungen nach synthetischer Einheit buchstabiren, um sie als Erfahrung lesen zu können, und daß unsere Vernunft natürlicher Weise sich zu Erkenntnissen aufschwinge, die viel weiter gehen, als daß irgend ein Gegenstand, den Erfahrung geben kann, jemals mit ihnen congruiren könne, die aber nichtsdestoweniger ihre Realität haben und keinesweges bloße Hirngespinste seyn.94 [Plato noted very well that our power of cognition feels a far higher need than that of merely spelling out appearances according to a synthetic unity in order to be able to read them as experience, and that our reason naturally exalts itself

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Kant as Preparer and Opponent of Platonism to cognitions that go much too far for any object that experience can ever give to be congruent, but that nonetheless have their reality and are by no means merely figments of the brain.]

Kant’s Ideas, that is to say, are crucially desynonymized from Lockean ‘notions’ which ultimately derive from sense-data. Polemic aside, however, as far as the ‘problems’ of philosophy are concerned, Coleridge is of course right to note Kant’s explicit opposition to Plato. Ideas as regulative, for Kant, are necessary and beneficial to our moral striving: they ‘serve the understanding as a canon for its extended and self-consistent use’. Coleridge retains this concept when he writes of the Ideas ‘irradiating’ the concepts of the Understanding.95 But even here, the term ‘irradiate’, implying activity and hence constitutive Ideas, Ideas with living potency, would be exactly the kind of ‘Uebertriebene des Ausdrucks’ [exaggerated expression] to which Kant objects in Plato.96 According to Kant, Reason, as the wandering mazes of traditional metaphysics show, has a natural propensity to overstep the boundaries of possible experience. The ‘Transcendental Dialectic’, which earned Kant the nickname ‘Alleszermalmer’ [all-crusher], is designed to put an end to such illegitimate uses of Reason. Summarizing in the Appendix, Kant writes: die transzcendentalen Ideen sind niemals von constitutivem Gebrauche, so, daß dadurch Begriffe gewisser Gegenstände gegeben würden, und in dem Falle, daß man sie so versteht, sind es bloß vernünftelnde (dialectische) Begriffe. Dagegen aber haben sie einen vortreff lichen und unentbehrlichnotwendigen regulativen Gebrauch, nemlich den Verstand zu einem gewissen Ziele zu richten, in Aussicht auf welches die Richtungslinien aller seiner Regeln in einen Punct zusammenlaufen.97 [the transcendental ideas are never of constitutive use, so that the concepts of certain objects would thereby be given, and if they are so understood, the result is merely sophistical (dialectical) concepts. On the contrary, however, they have an excellent and indispensably necessary regulative use, namely that of directing the understanding to a certain goal respecting which the lines of direction of all its rules converge at one point.]

This is what Coleridge meant in the quotation with which I began this chapter, by saying that Kant (mistakenly, in Coleridge’s view) identified Platonic dialectic with sophism. But how was it that whereas Kant himself considered Fichte, Schelling, and other idealists to be sophistically transgressing the proper boundaries of Reason, the members of the younger generation themselves claimed (at least in the 1790s) to be continuing Kant’s work? How could Coleridge have considered this development necessary, while attributing the requisite hints to Kant: ‘what since Kant is not in Kant in germ at least?’98 To answer such questions requires a glance at the wider phenomenon of post-Kantianism, which in Hamilton’s words ‘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’.99

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Coleridge among the Post-Kantians I have been referring to Coleridge as having interpreted Kant’s epistemology through Plato, especially with regard to Ideas. It is necessary at this point to defend these terms, however, and delve a little further into the vexed question of inf luences on Coleridge, in addition to explicitly addressing the topic of postKantian aesthetics that has so far remained in the background of my discussion. For was Coleridge not referring to Plato arbitrarily, for the sake of an authoritative veneer, while in fact constructing — as Wellek says — a crazy and unsatisfactory edifice pieced together from Kant, the post-Kantians, and Anglican theology?100 First, in view of the conf lict just noted between Kant and his successors, it must be answered (with Hedley) that [a]lthough Coleridge considered the primacy of the spirit to have been firmly established by Kant, the nature of this realm and its relation to physical phenomena was very much open for discussion. [. . .] Thus Coleridge had more scope for his own philosophical work than is sometimes conceded by critics such as Wellek or Orsini.101

Secondly, Wellek’s classic account is inf luenced by the Hegelian narrative of teleo­ logical progress in German idealism from Kant to Hegel. When Wellek attacks Coleridge for slipping back into a pre-critical, seventeenth-century ‘mere philo­ sophy of faith’,102 the implication is that he should have been marching forward in step with Hegel, and this is at least questionable. Thirdly, studies of Coleridge’s intellectual background have often made a false separation between inf luence from German idealism and inf luence from Greek thought, the latter usually being taken together with ‘native English’ Cambridge Platonism. As an early historian of rationalism wrote: two elements [. . .] coming from totally different elements [. . .] harmonized in [Coleridge’s] mind [. . .] one was the Grecian, taking its rise in Plato and afterwards becoming assimilated to Christianity at Alexandria. The other was the German derived directly from Kant.103

It is clear from Hedley’s sketch of the Christian Platonic inheritance of Schelling and Hegel that this is a false separation.104 Moreover, the three points I have just outlined are illuminated by Beiser’s recent work, German Idealism. Beiser challenges the Hegelian narrative which tends to present German idealism as progress towards recognition of the ‘subjectivist’ absolute ego, or infinite self as the foundational principle of philosophy.105 According to Beiser, this interpretation has been fed by the confusion which has arisen through the double meaning of the term ‘ideal’: ‘the ideal can be the mental in contrast to the physical, the spiritual rather than the material; or it can be the archetypical in contrast to the ectypical, the normative rather than the substantive’. Two readings of ‘idealism’ are then possible, depending on which definition one adopts: ‘Idealism in the former sense is the doctrine that all reality depends upon some self-conscious subject; idealism in the latter sense is the doctrine that everything is a manifestation of the ideal, an appearance of reason’. If the latter sense is admitted, it becomes possible to see German idealism

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as, contra the traditional Hegelian narrative, actually ‘a story about the progressive de-subjectivization of the Kantian legacy, the growing recognition that the ideal realm consists not in personality and subjectivity but in the normative, the archetypal, and the intelligible’. On Beiser’s reading ‘[t]he history of German idealism is therefore more the story about the progressive unfolding of neo-Platonism’.106 ‘Unfolding’ is also a very appropriate word for what Coleridge thought he was doing with Kant’s supposed esoterica. Before assuming that when Coleridge speaks of preexistence, constitutive Ideas, intellectual intuition, and so on, he is being somehow untrue to his separate Kantian inf luence, it is worth heeding Beiser’s reminder that ‘Platonism plays a central role in the worldview’ of post-Kantian idealists who strove to harmonize this with their development of Kant. Hölderlin, Hegel, Novalis, Schelling, and Friedrich Schlegel all began their philosophical education by reading Plato (in Greek), especially the Phaedo and Symposium. Beiser argues: the mysticism of the early romantic idealists has so often been described as “antirationalist.” This is to assume, however, that their mysticism arises from the Protestant tradition, which limited the role of reason to the earthly sphere; but the mysticism of the idealists does not go beyond the realm of reason but into it, aspiring toward insight into the archetypical world.107

In this comment the reader of Coleridge can recognize the need for the key desynonymization: a Coleridgean rephrasing would be that this mysticism goes beyond the realm of Understanding, soaring into the realm of Reason. Coleridge’s above-quoted definition of reason perfectly accords with the tendency Beiser is describing: reason is ‘an organ bearing the same relation to spiritual objects, the Universal, the Eternal, and the Necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phenomena’.108 Explicit opponent of Plato though he was (as I elaborate below), Kant was nevertheless the preparer of this ‘new school’ (as it was known collectively at the time), owing precisely to what Coleridge considered his esoteric ‘hints’, or what has more recently been described as his ‘opacity’. The Platonizing of Kant often focused on the Critique of the Power of Judgment, the third Critique, which Kant conceived as a necessary bridge between the two terms of the dualism so starkly portrayed in the first two Critiques: an issue with which, as we have seen, Coleridge struggled energetically. The human being, according to that dualism, is simultaneously a causally determined member of the sensible world, and a free member of the intelligible world in which we legislate ourselves according to the moral law: an ‘unübersehbare Kluft’ [incalculable gulf ] separates the two.109 The aim of our free moral striving is to bring about the highest good — but can that highest good really be attained in the determined world in which we find ourselves? Kant insists that this must be possible (otherwise the concept of the moral law would be incoherent), and that in order to maintain that possibility, we have to postulate both the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. It is primarily to these postulates, which apparently reintroduce concepts of speculative metaphysics that Kant had just banished through the antinomies, that Beiser (and presumably Coleridge too) refers as perhaps more deferential to the censor than rigorous in argument. In the third Critique, however, Kant produces a different and potentially more satisfactory

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solution to the ‘incalculable gulf ’. This new solution is based on the power of imagination. The imagination operates as a ‘produktives Erkenntnisvermögen’ [productive cognitive faculty], which is ‘sehr mächtig in Schaffung gleichsam einer anderen Natur aus dem Stoffe, den ihr die wirkliche gibt [. . .] wobei wir unsere Freiheit vom Gesetze der Assoziation [. . .] fühlen’ [very powerful in creating, as it were, another nature, out of the material that actual nature gives it [. . .] in this process we feel our freedom from the law of association]. Imagination, that is, is a mediating faculty that moves freely, as it were, between the ‘two worlds’, exercising creative power. It transforms natural materials into something entirely different, namely into that which ‘die Natur übertrifft’ [steps beyond nature].110 As Jane Kneller explains the implication of this argument: This suggests that Kant’s account of imaginative freedom in the third Critique offers a solution to the problem of grounding our belief in the possibility of bringing about the highest good. The existence of a moral world presupposes agency that can bring it about, and the command to seek it presupposes that we can believe in the possibility of a moral world on earth and in ourselves as creators of that world. Our ability to represent such a world in imagination would allow us to believe in the possibility of a moral world on earth and in ourselves as creators of that world.111

Imagination in free play produces what Kant refers to as ‘ideas’, embodied in beautiful works of art. However, in a highly difficult and controversial passage, Kant then resists the possible inference that beauty in art can schematize morality, i.e. provide a sensible representation adequate to a moral idea: instead, he argues, it can only symbolize morality, i.e. provide a representation with no direct relationship to the moral, which functions by a process of mere analogy.112 ‘Yet’, argues Kneller, ‘it is difficult to see why Kant insists on the complete inability of imagination in free play to portray moral Ideas, given what he has already said about its creative power in ref lective judgment’.113 This uncertainty was the stimulus to a series of later attempts to achieve a delicate and perhaps impossible balance: on the one hand, to maintain the autonomy of the aesthetic precisely as Kant had outlined; and on the other, to relate imaginative art more closely to moral principles, or (adapting Kneller’s phrase) to discern moral Ideas in the play of imagination. Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education was the pioneering work in this respect, and it is entirely logical that so many parallels with Schiller’s programme should be found in Coleridge, for instance in the Biographia’s account of the indirect moral instructiveness of Wordsworth’s poetry.114 The religion of art proclaimed in Schelling’s early works also stemmed partly from Kant’s suggestive but truncated account of imagination; and Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism was, in turn, one of the main sources for the Biographia’s famous definition of the ‘primary IMAGINATION’ as ‘the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception’, and the ‘secondary’ or artistic imagination as an ‘echo’ of the same.115 In all these endeavours, the ‘new school’ of philosophers looked both to Plato’s doctrine of Ideas, and to Socrates’ moral teachings; the translation of the dialogues of Plato undertaken by Schleiermacher in the early 1800s thus became central to the development of aesthetics in Germany.

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Owing precisely to this post-Kantian ferment, with which Coleridge was as familiar as an Englishman of his day could possibly be, it is hard to pin down his direct response to the Critique of the Power of Judgment.116 When he claimed in 1811 ‘to have mastered the spirit of Kant’s Critique of the Judgement’,117 he was clearly once again alluding to the post-Kantian distinction between the letter and the spirit of Kant, thus licensing himself to exploit precisely the kind of undeveloped hints concerning imagination and symbolism that I have just noted. Further, in 1810 he told Crabb Robinson that he considered it ‘the most astonishing of Kant’s works’ — an ambiguous remark that might not signify only praise.118 It is likely that the English poet and practical critic might have been not only enraptured by Kant’s accounts of genius, and the sublime, but also unable to accept Kant’s insistence that works of art can have no determinate cognitive content. It is probably significant, then, that Coleridge’s only extensive attempt to mediate Kantian aesthetics occurs in the context of the criticism of fine art rather than literature, in which the latter problem is considerably less pressing. Coleridge wrote the essay series Principles of Genial Criticism (1814) to accompany an exhibition of paintings by his friend Washington Allston.119 Coleridge lucidly introduces Kant’s concept of the subjective universality of judgments of taste,120 though without naming the German philosopher or employing that technical terminology, no doubt as a concession to the periodical-reading public. Further, he carefully distinguishes the beautiful from the good, clearly drawing again on Kant’s account of aesthetic autonomy. However, when Coleridge sums up this distinction at the end, a characteristically post-Kantian transfer into Platonic discourse occurs. He begins relatively cautiously: The GOOD consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former; and it is always discursive. The BEAUTIFUL arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgement and imagination: and it is always intuitive.

So far this approximately accords with Kant.121 However, having started from this subjective perspective on beauty, Coleridge suddenly invokes a constitutive Idea of an objective beauty, which actively calls to the human mind: As light to the eye, even such is beauty to the mind, which cannot but have complacency in whatever is perceived as pre-configured to its living faculties. Hence the Greeks called a beautiful object kalon, quasi kaloun, i.e. calling on the soul, which receives instantly and welcomes it as something connatural.

Coleridge’s reference to ‘the Greeks’ is in fact, as Jackson notes, to a speculative etymology in Plato’s Cratylus (416c–d). Now we might expect Coleridge to elaborate on the implications of this radical and no longer strictly Kantian statement about the nature of beauty. But instead he truncates the discussion with a quotation in Greek from Plotinus: specifically Ennead 1:6, which had impressed Coleridge in Thomas Taylor’s translation many years before. This quotation asserts mystically that the soul ‘speaks of the beautiful as if it were familiar with it, recognizes and welcomes and, so to speak, adapts itself to it’. Wellek may be right to note that

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this abrupt assertion of the interaction between beauty and the soul constitutes a desertion of Kant’s intention;122 but Coleridge wishes in this way to hint that (Neo)platonism offers the key to unlock Kant’s reticence. At the same time he acknowledges that poetic, as opposed to merely logical, language is required to respond to the outward-reaching nature of beauty — and Coleridge offers this insight only f leetingly, owing to his own convictions regarding an esoteric method: such topics were for private speculation rather than public pronouncement. This Platonic turn, however, remains highly suggestive. It helps to make further sense, I think, of Coleridge’s notion of reading ‘by anticipation’, discussed in Chapter 1 — the process by which a text seems to call up powers previously concealed in the reader’s mind, which one then recognizes to have been there all along. In making such a turn, Coleridge has much in common with the early German Romantics; and his thought deserves to be treated alongside theirs. Stated brief ly, in Cassirer’s words, ‘To poeticize philosophy and to philosophize poetry — such was the highest aim of all romantic thinkers’.123 I have elsewhere sketched a comparison between Coleridge’s concept of a ‘philosophic poem’ (what he wished Wordsworth to compose) and the notion of ‘Transzendentalpoesie’ articulated by Coleridge’s exact contemporary and fellow Plato-lover, Friedrich Schlegel.124 Here, however, I wish to concentrate on the tensions involved in such post-Kantian ideals of poetic philosophy, tensions which Coleridge experienced no less keenly than Schlegel and other Romantics. The Conf lict between Kant and Plato I have indicated two complementary strategies by which Coleridge attempts to bring Plato and Kant together. Either he criticizes Kant’s restrictions on our possible knowledge of the noumenal realm, aligning the German philosopher with Aristotle and invoking Plato in opposition; or he suggests that Kant was hinting at this Platonic knowledge all along. Coleridge will use one or the other of these strategies depending on the context of his own particular discussions. It is now necessary to return to problems of language, however, and to note that what is most interestingly registered in Coleridge’s prose is the tension involved in attempting this harmonization at all. Can a prose style be achieved that would be both Platonist and Kantian? For as I have already noted, Coleridge was sensitive to Kant’s explicit opposition to the Platonic claim to knowledge of the noumenal realm; and Kant’s quarrel with Plato turns repeatedly on the appropriate tone for philosophical discourse. Kant suggests that Plato adopts a sublime, soaring rhetoric because this is easier than the patient overcoming of logical problems. Kant’s memorable metaphor may have the charioteer of the Phaedrus in mind: Die leichte Taube, indem sie im freyen Fluge die Luft theilt, deren Widerstand sie fühlt, könnte die Vorstellung fassen, daß es ihr im luftleeren Raum noch viel besser gelingen werde. Eben so verließ Plato die Sinnenwelt, weil sie dem Verstande so enge Schranken setzt, und wagte sich jenseit derselben, auf den Flügeln der Ideen, in den leeren Raum des reinen Verstandes. Er bemerkte

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In the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant similarly assesses Plato’s inferences from geometry with a mixture of admiration and disapproval: the ancient geometers ergötzten [. . .] sich an einer Zweckmäßigkeit in dem Wesen der Dinge, die sich doch völlig a priori in ihrer Notwendigkeit darstellen konnten. Plato, selbst Meister in dieser Wissenschaft, geriet über eine solche ursprüngiche Beschaffenheit der Dinge, welche zu entdecken wir alle Erfahrung entbehren können, und über das Vermögen des Gemüts, die Harmonie der Wesen aus ihrem übersinnlichen Prinzip schöpfen zu können (wozu noch die Eigen­ schaften der Zahlen kommen, mit denen das Gemüt in der Musik spielt), in die Begeisterung, welche ihn über die Erfahrungsbegriffe zu Ideen erhob, die ihm nur durch eine intellektuelle Gemeinschaft mit dem Ursprunge aller Wesen erklärlich zu sein schienen. Kein Wunder, daß er den der Meßkunst Unkundigen aus seiner Schule verwies [. . .] wobei es schon verzeihlich ist, daß diese Bewunderung durch Mißverstand nach und nach bis zur Schwärmerei steigen mochte. [delighted in a purposiveness in the essence of things, which they could yet exhibit fully a priori in its necessity. Plato, himself a master of this science, was led by such an original constitution of things, in the discovery of which we can dispense with all experience, and by the mental capacity for drawing the harmony of things out of their supersensible principle (to which pertain the properties of numbers, with which the mind plays in music), to the enthusiasm that elevated him beyond the concepts of experience to Ideas, which seemed to him only explicable by means of an intellectual communion with the origin of things. No wonder that he banned from his school those who were ignorant of geometry [. . .] it is surely excusable if, as the result of a misunderstanding, this admiration gradually increased to the point of fanaticism.]126

Kant developed this criticism in an essay of 1796 which Coleridge found ‘admirable’,127 ‘Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie’ [On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in philosophy]. The immediate occasion for this polemic was Johann Georg Schlosser’s annotated translation of Plato’s Seventh Letter, whose antidemocratic message was couched in a f lorid style; but Kant was also combating the larger revival of Platonic philosophizing in 1790s Germany.128 Jacobi was probably a major target.129 Kant attacks the claim of such writers to ‘intellektuelle Anschauung’ [intellectual intuition].130 They find this concept attractive, in his opinion, because the knowledge gained by painstaking ascent to the supersensible through concepts of the understanding is both inferior and harder than a direct vision would be. The

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philosopher of intuition simply f lies above the Herculean labour of self-knowledge (‘die herkulische Arbeit des Selbsterkenntnisses [. . .] überf liegend’).131 This, however, constitutes the unacceptable vanity of a would-be aristocracy, unprepared to work for a living: hence the ‘superior tone’ of these writers. Kant presents a polarity between Plato, ‘der Vater aller Schwärmerei’ [the father of all excessive enthusiasm], and Aristotle, whose philosophy is ‘dagegen Arbeit’ [in contrast, work]. He wrote similarly in an interesting unpublished note that ‘Der Ursprung aller philosophischen Schwärmerei liegt in Platons ursprünglichen gottlichen Anschauungen aller mögliche objecte’ [the origin of all philosophical enthusiasm lies in Plato’s original divine intuitions of all possible objects].132 For Kant sees Plato (alongside Pythagoras) as the original culprit for the aristocratic negligence now perpetrated in his name, despite the fact that he had an honourable motivation: according to Kant, the fundamental question ‘how are synthetic propositions a priori possible?’ did occur to Plato, but he f lew to the doctrine of anamnesis by way of premature answer.133 Here as elsewhere Kant is fascinated by anamnesis: it is in a sense a laudable answer to the problem that ‘eine Anschauung a priori mußten wir doch haben, wenn wir uns das Vermögen synthetischer Sätze a priori in der reinen Mathematik begreif lich machen wollten’ [we must have had an intuition a priori, if we wished to make comprehensible to ourselves the capacity to have synthetic propositions a priori in pure mathematics]; but it results in the presumptuous claim of ‘a pre-given ability to feel an object that can still be encountered only in pure reason’.134 Therefore Kant attacks the ‘new level of assent’ involved, a level that would include the ‘higher logic’ of Coleridge. The ‘Ahndung’ [intimation] of the supersensible is the claim, in Kant’s view, which threatens to ruin all philosophical discourse. (Likewise in Anthropology, Kant commonsensically dismisses all ‘Ahndung’ as a ‘Hirngespenst’ [phantasm].135) Finally, Kant rounds on Plato for hinting at some kind of inner light, the nature of which he cannot explain. If it is inexplicable, comments Kant ironically, so much the better, since an esoteric atmosphere is essential to the philosophy of intimations. But this is not in fact philosophy at all: for ‘[i]m Grunde ist wohl alle Philosophie prosaisch; und ein Vorschlag, jetzt wiederum poetisch zu philosophieren, mögte wohl so aufgenommen werden, als der für den Kaufmann: seine Handelsbücher künftig nicht in Prose, sondern in Versen zu schreiben’ [at bottom, all philosophy is indeed prosaic; and the suggestion that we should now start to philosophize poetically would be just as welcome as the suggestion that a businessman should in the future no longer write his account books in prose but rather in verse].136 Coleridge’s admiration of this essay must to some extent be in tension with, for instance, his ‘aristocratic’ reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ as speaking to the few capable of watching their inward natures and discovering metaphorical truth in Platonic anamnesis; or his sense that he had come to Plato through an ‘ahndung, an inward omening’ of something congenial to his nature.137 It would certainly be oversimplifying to say that the mature, socially conservative Coleridge naturally sided with an aristocratic, genteel, work-shy version of Plato and his modern progeny. With his ‘pious, ever-labouring, subtle mind’ (in Carlyle’s description),138 Coleridge loved Spinoza for his iron chain of logic, and longed to conclude his own

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arguments with a decisive ‘Q.E.D.’. He carefully desynonymized ‘enthusiasm’ from ‘fanaticism’, and concurred with the substance (though questioning the vehemence) of Kant’s critique of a visionary such as Swedenborg.139 One of his greatest fears was that of passing off paper promises for gold upon his own mind, using his linguistic facility to construct a poetic veil which conceals only a lack of substance; hence the lawyer-like precision in his definitions and desynonymies. How, then, was Coleridge able to accommodate this tension? A number of explanations seem possible. First, he discovered Platonic ‘hints and insinuations’ in Kant, as discussed above. Second, he was (to recall Perry’s epithet) doubleminded. He wanted on the one hand to work and set all demonstrations on the level of geometrical proof; but on the other he wanted intellectual gold, and that was not guaranteed by Kant’s explicit method. At some point there must be an ascent from common logic to higher logic, from prose to poetry, as it were. Third, there is the vital difference between his private and public writings, which in part corresponds to his perception of the distinction between Plato’s esoteric and exoteric teaching. Wellek’s insight, I think, needs to be stated in reverse: Coleridge ‘has used Kant in an indistinct wishy-washy popularizing manner to conform with traditional philosophy without, it seems, having realized the contradiction between this colorless Kant and the Kant he knew and had studied in the solitude of his library’.140 Without agreeing that the Kant of The Principles of Genial Criticism or the Biographia Literaria is ‘colourless’, one can see how the silence-formulae, textual ruptures, and esoteric gestures in those works (which a Kantian work-ethic would find unacceptable) ref lect what Coleridge himself called the ‘anxiety of authorship’ — the anxiety, that is, of publication and consequent reception by an unfit, anonymous readership. Where I think Wellek errs is in supposing that Coleridge did not see the difference between the Kant he attempted to mediate publicly and the Kant he encountered in his study. His awareness of the difference can be felt in the contrast between the elevated prose and erratic structure of the Biographia, the patient exposition of the Logic, and the self-questioning of the Marginalia. For all their troublesome differences, the philosophies of Plato and Kant were united in Coleridge’s mind in demanding inward change, rather than (or prior to) assent to impersonal propositions whose form is indifferent to and uninf lected by the condition of the mind that is to apprehend them: therefore it is not surprising that his prose style should differ according to whether his audience is (i) the public; (ii) the small band of like-minded followers such as Green; or (iii) himself, alone. A fourth reason for Coleridge’s accommodation of this tension in his philosophical writing may be, however, that to ask whether philosophy should be prosaic (labour-intensive) or poetic (intuitive) is not necessarily only to be offered a choice between Kant and Plato. For the dilemma was already present within Plato’s writings themselves, in the form of the Ancient Quarrel between poetry and philosophy, the determination that poetry is insufficiently rational to function as a mode of inquiry.

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Notes to Chapter 2

1. BL i, 153. 2. CM iv, 157–58. 3. CL ii, 682. 4. Orsini, p. 48. 5. Leask, p. 82. 6. CL i, 209, 284. 7. Monthly Review, 10 (April 1793), p. 526, quoted by Giuseppe Micheli, The Early Reception of Kant’s Thought in England 1785–1805 (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993), p. 23 — henceforth: Micheli. 8. Kathleen M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1981), p. 10. 9. F. A. Nitsch, A General and Introductory View of Professor Kant’s Principles Concerning Man, the World and the Deity (London: Downes, 1796; facsimile edition London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993); O’Keefe, An Essay on the Progress of the Human Understanding (London, 1795). See further Micheli, pp. 58–72, and Monika Class, ‘Dr J. A. O’Keeffe: Irish Mediator of Kantian Philo­sophy — Life, Work and Legacy’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 22 (2007), 206–14. On the importance of Reinhold as an interpreter of Kant, see the introduction to Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, ed. by Karl Ameriks, trans. by James Hebbeler (Cambridge: Cam­bridge University Press, 2005). 10. Monthly Review, 20 (August 1796), 486–90 (p. 489). 11. J. Richardson, The Principles of Critical Philosophy (London: J. Johnson, 1797); A. F. M. Willich, Elements of the Critical Philosophy (London: Longman, 1798), which was annotated by J. H. Green, not by Coleridge as asserted by René Wellek (Immanuel Kant in England 1793–1838 (1931, reprinted with Micheli, Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993), p. 21 — henceforth: Wellek) and Elisabeth Winkelmann (Coleridge und die Kantische Philosophie: Erste Einwirkungen des deutschen Idealismus in England (Leipzig: Mayer & Müller, 1933), p. 31 — henceforth: Winkelmann): see CM vi, 335. 12. Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 155–69. Braithwaite comments that ‘Johnson’s very public association with Coleridge at such a critical moment in 1798 can only have aggravated the bookseller’s case’ (p. 162). 13. See Micheli, p. 105; Wellek, pp. 16–19. 14. Anti-Jacobin Review, 4 (December 1799), p. xiii; quoted in Micheli, p. 87. 15. Anti-Jacobin Review, 6 (May 1800), p. 574; quoted in Micheli, p. 92. 16. Anti-Jacobin Review, 4 (December 1799), p. xiii; quoted in Micheli, p. 93. 17. Gregory Maertz, ‘Reviewing Kant’s Early Reception in Britain: The Leading Role of Henry Crabb Robinson’, in Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age, ed. by Gregory Maertz (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 209–26. 18. Micheli, pp. 96–100. 19. German Museum, 1–3 ( January 1800–June 1801). 20. For Coleridge in Göttingen, see Winkelmann, pp. 34–40; Maximiliaan van Woudenberg, ‘Coleridge’s Literary Studies at Göttingen in 1799: Reconsidering the Library Borrowings from the University of Göttingen’, Coleridge Bulletin, 21 (Spring 2003), 66–80. 21. CL i, 444. 22. CL i, 519, 599. 23. CM iii, 256. 24. CL ii, 706–07, March 1801. On what Coleridge meant by extricating the notions of time and space, see A. O. Lovejoy, ‘Coleridge and Kant’s Two Worlds’, in Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Braziller, 1955), pp. 254–76 (pp. 258–60). 25. BL i, 163. 26. Don Juan, ‘Dedication’. 27. De Quincey, ‘On the English Notices of Kant’, London Magazine, 8 ( July 1823), 87–95, reprinted in De Quincey, Works, iii, 85–97 (p. 95).

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28. Susan Manning, ‘Literature and Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, iv: The Eighteenth Century, ed. by H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 587–613 (p. 608). 29. Not that critical consensus has been reached on the Logic’s Kantian credentials: its exposition of Kant’s Table of Categories has been described as ‘slavish’ (Wellek, p. 123), ‘faithful’ (Orsini, p. 115), ‘radically revisionary’ ( James C. McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 120), and a ‘summary and simplification’ (Gregory, Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination, p. 94). Most recently, Richard Berkeley states that the work contains ‘plagiarisms’ of Kant (Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason, pp. 200, 202); but is plagiarism possible in an unpublished work? A balanced study of the Logic would be a good place for a full reassessment of Coleridge’s Kant­reception to begin. 30. Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare and Some of the old Poets and Dramatists with Other Literary Remains of S. T. Coleridge, ed. by Mrs H. N. Coleridge, 2 vols (London: Pickering, 1849), p. viii. 31. Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 44. 32. CL v, 13. 33. Robert Morrison, ‘ “Reviewers and Frenchmen” in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 42 (1995), 180–81. 34. James Vigus, ‘Zwischen Kantianismus und Schellingianismus: Henry Crabb Robinsons Privatvorlesungen über Philosophie für Madame de Staël 1804 in Weimar’, in Germaine de Staël und ihr erstes deutsches Publikum, ed. by Olaf Müller and Gerhard R. Kaiser (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), 357–93. Robinson’s texts are printed in Henry Crabb Robinson: Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics, ed. by James Vigus (Leeds: Maney, forthcoming 2009). 35. Wellek, pp. 32–33. 36. Edinburgh Review, January 1803, 253–80, reprinted in Life and Collected Works of Thomas Brown, 8 vols (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 2003), iii, 258, 264, 275. 37. David M. Baulch, ‘The “Perpetual Exercise of an Interminable Quest”: The Biographia Literaria and the Kantian Revolution’, Studies in Romanticism, 43.4 (Winter 2004), 557–81. 38. Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 318 — henceforth: Kuehn. 39. BL i, 154; Kuehn, pp. 339, 378–80. 40. BL i, 155; Kuehn, p. 404. 41. Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1992), p. 53. I explore this point further below. 42. BL i, 293. 43. Drummond, Academical Questions (London, 1805), pp. 352, 364. Cf. Peacock: ‘Scythrop’s romantic dreams had indeed given him many pure anticipated cognitions of combinations of beauty and intelligence’: Nightmare Abbey (London: Penguin, 1969; first published 1818), p. 50. 44. See Ashton (p. 41) and Wellek (p. 122) for favourable assessments of Coleridge on the a priori. Nitsch on the a priori is comparatively vague (General and Introductory View, p. 83). For Kant’s definition, see Critique of Pure Reason, B2–3. 45. BL i, 293; cf. Logic, p. 76, and p. 146 where the analogy of the eye recurs; cf. Friend, i, 111. 46. CL ii, 685–86; BL i, 141; LS, p. 111; Logic, p. 226; Phil. Lects. ii, 574–75. 47. BL i, 117; Orsini, p. 66. 48. Orsini, p. 78. 49. BL ii, 147. 50. CL ii, 678–85; ‘how much was done by Kant, in strictly appropriating the term, “a priori.” Had this been fully elucidated, Locke would never have had the suffrage of [sensible eighteenth­ century] men, like Petvin’ (CM iv, 112); cf. Jackson’s commentary in Phil. Lects. i, l­lii. 51. See Chapter 1, above. Coleridge again invokes Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ in the ‘Essays on Method’ in The Friend, as I discuss in Chapter 5. Some twentieth­century scholars have seen in Plato’s anamnesis the first Western discovery of the a priori. If so, however, the difference remains that Kant’s a priori is subjective, whereas Plato’s is objective, the Ideas being absolutely objective realities which the mind grasps: see Giovanni Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy, ii: Plato and Aristotle, ed. and trans. by John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 122–23.

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52. This question is raised by D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Coleridge and Kant’, in Coleridge’s Variety, ed. by John Beer (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 183–203, but MacKinnon is not clear on the motivations for Coleridge’s preference (p. 197). 53. CM iii, 318; cf. Logic, p. 243 and BL i, 288–89. 54. See Kuehn, p. 190. 55. Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 37. Beiser actually detects a subtle antiidealism in the Dissertation, but Coleridge presumably did not feel this. Coleridge distinguishes the phenomenal and noumenal worlds as early as 1805 (CN ii, 2666); cf. Friend, i, 291. 56. Vermischte Schriften, ii, 452 (§9). 57. Lovejoy, ‘Coleridge and Kant’s Two Worlds’, pp. 264–65; cf. Hedley, pp. 162–69, and Deirdre Coleman, Coleridge and ‘The Friend’, 1809–1810 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 137–38. 58. De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis, IIID, in Vermischte Schriften, ii, 464. 59. CN iii, 3973. 60. CN iii, 3973. 61. See Friend, i, 492; Phil. Lects. ii, 559. Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius, 1798), §38. 62. Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne memorably promotes the reputation of Kant as a solitary engaged in sublime contemplations. 63. See Robert B. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 109–20. For Kant’s third antinomy, Critique of Pure Reason, B472–79. 64. CN iii, 3973. 65. Logic, p. 150. 66. Cf. CN iii, 3953. Vallins argues that truth, for Coleridge, consists in the tension between feelings and expression, noting that he often mistrusts expression per se (Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism, pp. 37–42). 67. CM iii, 257. 68. KrV B xxxi. A detailed account of Kant’s self-identification with Socrates’ moral midwifery is Heiner Bielefeldt, Symbolic Representation in Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 21–23. 69. What they all wanted was, a pre-inquisition into the mind, as part Organ, part Constituent of all Knowledge: an examination of the Scales, Weights and Measures themselves, abstracted from the Objects to be weighed or measured by them — in short, a transcendental Aesthetic, Logic, and Noetic. (CM v, 81; cf. CM iii, 918–19) This criticism was neglected by Claude Howard, Coleridge’s Idealism. A Study of his Relationship to Kant and to the Cambridge Platonists (Boston: Badger, 1924), who misleadingly argued that the Cambridge Platonists ‘anticipated all the essential points of Kant’s idealism’ (p. 98): a claim surprisingly revived in Christina Flores, Plastic Intellectual Breeze: The Contribution of Ralph Cudworth to S. T. Coleridge’s Early Poetics of the Symbol (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008). 70. Phil. Lects. ii, 538. 71. Critique of Pure Reason, B45. 72. BL i, 155 and n. 73. Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (1795), quoted in Wellek, p. 97. 74. BL i, 153–54. 75. Wellek, p. 97. 76. Logic, p. 131; cf. CM iii, 249. 77. Logic, p. 151; for further examples, Orsini, p. 91. 78. BL i, 289. 79. Friend, i, 155–56; cf. 190–91, 490–95; Winkelmann, pp. 53–121; on Jacobi as an inf luence on Coleridgean Reason, see Thomas McFarland, ‘Aspects of Coleridge’s Distinction between Reason and Understanding’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, ed. by Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), pp. 165–80; and on Neoplatonic-mystical discourse in the wake of Kant’s Critiques, Dieter Henrich, ‘The Allure of “Mysticism” ’, in Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, ed. by David S. Pacini (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 65–81.

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80. In Chapter 4 I discuss Coleridge’s use of the antinomies to interpret Plato’s dialogues, and vice versa. 81. Logic, p. 204; cf. p. 213, where Coleridge defines transcendental logic as the ‘analysis of the pure understanding’. Coleridge elsewhere suggested the first Critique should be entitled ‘An inquisition respecting the constitution and limits of the Human Understanding’ (CL v, 421). Jacobi argued similarly: see Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis Werke, ed. by Friedrich Roth and Friedrich Köppen, 6 vols in 7 (Leipzig, 1812–25), vol. iii; and Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Reason the Understanding and Time (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1961), p. 12. 82. CM iii, 249. 83. Quoted in Winkelmann, p. 178. 84. Orsini, p. 128, citing CN ii, 2057. 85. Critique of Pure Reason, B137. 86. Critique of Pure Reason, B139–40; Orsini, p. 117. Kant substantially rewrote this section for the second edition. 87. Critique of Pure Reason, B137. 88. BL i, 279–80. This is an admittedly drastic summary of the genesis of the Biographia’s ‘I AM’; for full detail, see Friedrich A. Uehlein, Die Manifestation des Selbstbewußtseins im konkreten ‘Ich bin’: Endliches und Unendliches Ich im Denken S. T. Coleridges (Hamburg: Meiner, 1982). Cf. also Breunig, Verstand und Einbildungskraft, pp. 188 ff. 89. See Chapter 5, below. 90. CN i, 1717, 1711; Hedley (p. 183) contrasts his praise of the Platonists’ psychology (CN iii, 3935). 91. SM (Appendix E), pp. 113–14. Trans. ‘In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men’, a variation on John 1. 4. De Paolo helpfully reviews Coleridge’s regulative/constitutive distinction (pp. 91–95). For a full unfolding of Coleridge’s distinction between Platonists and Aristotelians, see e.g. CM v, 770–71, and David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought (London: Murray, 1974). 92. Critique of Pure Reason, B370. 93. Critique of Pure Reason, B372–73. 94. Critique of Pure Reason, B370–71. 95. CL v, 136–38. 96. Critique of Pure Reason, B375. 97. Critique of Pure Reason, B672. 98. Quoted in Winkelmann, p. 242. 99. Hamilton, Coleridge and German Philosophy, p. 4. 100. Wellek, pp. 67–68. 101. Hedley, p. 29; cf. Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1987), p. 43. 102. Wellek, p. 135. 103. John F. Hurst, History of Rationalism (London: Trübner, 1867), p. 368. 104. Hedley, pp. 31–32. On the pairing of Kant with Plato as a standard strategy of nineteenthcentury Kantians, see Melissa Lane, Plato’s Progeny (London: Duckworth, 2001), pp. 64–70, who also acknowledges the historical importance of Coleridge’s interpretation (pp. 70–74). 105. Not of course that Hegel himself was a subjectivist, but If Hegel’s absolute is interpreted as an infinite mind, and if one accepts that his system is the culmination of German idealism, then it seems as if the idea of the absolute or infinite subject must be the final purpose of German idealism itself. This simple but seductive view has had a deep impact upon the historiography of German idealism, if only because so much of its history has been written from a Hegelian standpoint. (Beiser, German Idealism, p. 9; cf. Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, p. 8) For defining ‘idealism’, cf. Hedley, pp. 23–24. 106. German Idealism, p. 6. 107. Beiser, German Idealism, p. 364; on the vital Platonic strand in Schelling, pp. 563–64. 108. Friend, i, 155–56.

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109. Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:175–76. 110. Critique of the Power of Judgment, §49, 5:314. 111. Jane Kneller, Kant and the Power of Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 52. In this paragraph I have relied on Kneller, pp. 45–53. 112. Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 59, 5:352. 113. Kneller, p. 54. 114. See Michael John Kooy, Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), who also points out that Coleridge, while extensively drawing on the Critique of the Power of Judgment, objected to its subjective bias (pp. 100–06). 115. BL i, 304. I consider Coleridge’s adaptation of Schelling’s exploration of the ground common to man and nature in Chapters 3 and 5. 116. Ben Brice, Coleridge and Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 81–93, argues interestingly that Kant’s ‘anti-symbolic’ aesthetics ref lected a sceptical ‘agnosticism’ that must have been troubling for Coleridge; but this begs the question of how Coleridge read Kant. On Coleridge’s struggle to reconcile conf licting strands of post-Kantian thought, see Tim Milnes, ‘Through the Looking-Glass: Coleridge and Post-Kantian Philosophy’, in Comparative Literature, 51.4 (Autumn 1999), 309–23. 117. CL iii, 360. 118. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, Barrister-at-Law, F. S. A., ed. by Thomas Sadler, 2 vols (Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1870), 2nd edn, i, 195 (1810). 119. He continued to feel proud of these essays for many years: TT i, 453, and SWF i, 353. 120. Ross Wilson detects Coleridge’s accordance with Kantian ‘subjective universality’: ‘Coleridge’s “German Absolutism” ’, in Coleridge’s Afterlives, ed. by James Vigus and Jane Wright (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 171–87. 121. SWF i, 382–83. The editor identifies 5: 207 (§4) and 5: 236 (§17) as the relevant passages in Kant, though these are not exact correspondences. 122. Wellek, Kant in England, pp. 113–14. Nevertheless, a plausible comparison between Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Plato’s Symposium is made in Mihaela C. Fistioc, The Beautiful Shape of the Good: Platonic and Pythagorean Themes in Kant’s ‘Critique of the Power of Judgment’ (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). 123. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, p. 156. 124. James Vigus, ‘Transzendentalpoesie bei Friedrich Schlegel im Vergleich zum Begriff “Philo­ sophic Poem” bei Coleridge’, in Friedrich Schlegel und Friedrich Nietzsche: Transzendentalpoesie oder Dichtkunst mit Begriffen, ed. by Klaus Vieweg (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008), pp. 137–47. 125. Critique of Pure Reason, B8–9. 126. Critique of the Power of Judgment, B273–74, §62. 127. CM iii, 357; cf. CL iv, 4945. 128. Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. by Peter Fenves (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 72–74. My translations of Kant’s essay are based on Fenves. See further Heinz Heimsoeth, ‘Plato in Kants Werdegang’, in Studien zur Kants philosophischen Entwicklung, ed. by Heimsoeth and others (Hildesheim: Olms, 1967), pp. 124–43 (p. 136), which appropriately emphasizes Kant’s ambivalent stance toward Plato. 129. Lovejoy, The Reason, pp. 7–15. 130. Vermischte Schriften, iii, 304. 131. Vermischte Schriften, iii, 306. 132. Handwritten note 6051, quoted in Bielefeldt, Symbolic Representation in Kant’s Practical Philo­ sophy. 133. Vermischte Schriften, iii, 307. 134. Vermischte Schriften, iii, 307. 135. Anthropologie, §35. 136. Vermischte Schriften, iii, 333. 137. CN iii, 3935, discussed in Chapter 1, above. 138. Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling, p. 62.

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139. See the marginalia to ‘Träume eines Geistersehers’ (1766): CM iii, 316–18, 333, 350–55; and H. J. Jackson, ‘ “Swedenborg’s meaning is the truth”: Coleridge, Tulk, and Swedenborg’, in In Search of the Absolute: Essays on Swedenborg and Literature, ed. by Stephen McNeilly (London: Swedenborg Society, 2004), pp. 1–13, esp. p. 12. 140. Wellek, p. 69.

Chapter 3

v

The Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy The Ancient Quarrel in Coleridge When Socrates banishes the poets from his ideal state, he proposes to justify this measure by telling poetry that there is an Ancient Quarrel between it and philosophy.1 This seems to be one of Socrates’ ‘noble lies’, since in the fifth century bc the Quarrel, far from ancient, was of quite recent origin.2 Why did Plato, the poetic philosopher, endorse the banishment and stir up the Quarrel? Countless attempts have been made to explain away this puzzle,3 but it remains a central and inescapable element of the Republic and (if more mildly) the Laws. Coleridge himself recognized this in saying that ‘Plato banished the poets with more than Christian wrath’:4 neatly underlining the fact that an attitude to art which one might today term ‘puritan’ in fact spans both Christian moralists and the pre-Christian Plato. Indeed the Ancient Quarrel, genuinely ancient by Coleridge’s time, can be seen as one of Plato’s enduring legacies: subsequent writers in all periods have taken up his challenge to produce a defence of poetry,5 or conversely have sought to confirm the exclusion of poetic expression from philosophical ref lection. Shelley’s first version of his famous concluding sentence to the ‘Defence of Poetry’ was: ‘Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’; but the Ancient Quarrel showed itself when he deleted the words ‘and philosophers’.6 This was, as it were, the other side of the coin from Kant’s insistence that poetry should not be allowed to infiltrate the purity of philosophical discourse. Coleridge was double-minded in this regard as in so many others, but this particular manifestation of double-mindedness runs parallel to, and is to some extent informed by, conf licting tendencies in Plato himself. That Plato’s writings are (in Coleridge’s phrase) ‘poetry of the highest kind’,7 but that he nevertheless argues for the banishment of poetry, I take to ref lect a genuine ambivalence: and I think that a comparable ambivalence appears in Coleridge. This might appear an odd claim about a writer who memorably insists that ‘no man was ever a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher’, and who encouraged Wordsworth to write ‘THE FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM’.8 Let us recall, however, the young Coleridge’s description of the age of the Gnostics: ‘intel­lectual Brilliance received the honours due only to patient investigation, and the Philosopher invading the province of the Poet endeavoured to strike and

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dazzle by bold Fiction, and allegoric Personification’.9 Here, at the very outset of his intellectual career, he suggests that poetry and philosophy ought to maintain fully separate provinces. Many years later, in the Opus Maximum, the Kantian in Coleridge strives to preserve philosophy’s distinct sphere by purifying his language as far as possible from heteronomous poetic adornment; and it was part of his own self-mythology that ‘abstruse research’ could not coexist with his youthful poetic genius, but dampened and replaced it.10 But the most inf luential manifestation of the Quarrel is in Biographia Literaria, in which the theory of Imagination represents a deliberate but incomplete attempt to yoke philosophical and poetic acts of mind. Notoriously, the work splits approximately in two: book one on philosophy, book two on poetry. At the end of book one Coleridge announces a ‘transcendental deduction’ of the faculty of Imagination, which will provide a firm philosophical ground for the criticism of (Wordsworth’s) poetry in book two. The deduction, however, breaks off with an esoteric gesture: the fictitious letter from a friend recommending that Coleridge defer the complex proof to a later publication.11 In book two Coleridge nevertheless proceeds to employ the concept of Imagination as though it had in fact been ‘deduced’. The split between poetry and philosophy in the Biographia12 has been very inf luential. Although many critics have nevertheless discerned structural unity in the work, this is a relatively new tendency.13 Contemporaries had little hesitation in dismissing that part ‘which our author calls Philosophy’,14 while later in the century Leslie Stephen robustly diagnosed the Biographia’s dislocation: it was ‘put together with a pitchfork’.15 Victorian critics, indeed, routinely divided Coleridge’s work into the poetic and philosophical — invariably preferring the former. Thus although the title of Leigh Hunt’s work Imagination and Fancy (1844) sounds Coleridgean, it bypasses Coleridge’s theory entirely: rather Hunt’s purely intuitive method of spotting poetic beauties resembles Arnold’s notion of the ‘touchstone’, and whilst he delights in Coleridge’s poetry, he dismisses his philosophy and theology.16 Later critics followed this pattern by developing Coleridge’s notion of ‘practical criticism’17 at the same time as deploring his ‘metaphysics’ — essentially accepting Biographia book two while rejecting book one. In Paul Hamilton’s words: Coleridge’s public failure to unite philosophical theory with the practical criticism of poetry has had a momentous effect on subsequent literary criticism. It helped critics from Arnold to Leavis to overestimate the importance of a pure practical criticism, and even to believe in the possibility of its self-sufficiency. In their work practical criticism retains an air of philosophical seriousness, along with the tacit belief that we need not bother to explain the philosophy.18

Concomitant with this tendency to separate poetry from philosophy were judge­ ments like this (by T. S. Eliot): Nor am I sure that Coleridge learned so much from German philosophers, or earlier from Hartley, as he thought he did; what is best in his criticism seems to come from his own delicacy and subtlety of insight as he ref lected upon his own experience of writing poetry.19

I. A. Richards responds to Eliot by observing the unfairness of insisting that Coleridge’s ‘own’ poetic subtlety owed nothing to his omnivorous study of philo­

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sophy;20 but then the author of Practical Criticism intimates a similar prejudice when he asserts that ‘the more transcendental parts of Coleridge’ form ‘an indispensable introduction (from which we may disengage ourselves later) to his theory of criticism’.21 It could even be said that this premise of a divided Coleridge has long been central to English Literature as an institutional discipline, given its prominence in such foundational figures. Critics continue to divide Coleridge in this way, revealing their personal priorities as they do so. McFarland, for instance, sees an ‘immensely more urgent role, in his intellectual economy, of philosophy and theology rather than of literature and poetry’.22 The Ancient Quarrel, then, reverberates through Coleridge’s afterlives: as well it might, given the substantial parallels and allusions in his writing to Plato’s attacks on and implicit defences of poetry. A preparatory note on terms and historical context will help to suggest the informing quality of Plato’s discourses within Coleridge’s writing. ‘Poetry’ and ‘philosophy’ being broad terms whose meaning evolved over a long period from Plato to Coleridge, the largely ahistorical, comparative method of the present chapter requires some defence. What validates this method, I think, is that Coleridge himself was alert to the significations of these Greek terms. First, Coleridge states in consciously Platonic terms that ‘Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth’:23 the word ‘affectionate’ picking up the Greek etymology (‘philo’) and suggesting the kind of non-disinterested approach to thought which I have discussed above as ‘reading by anticipation’. Coleridge’s usage, then, is faithful to Plato’s technical sense of ‘loving/desiring the vision of truth’.24 In Republic Socrates gives the famous definition of the philosopher as lover of Sophia — usually translated ‘wisdom’, but since this is a vague word, Havelock’s circumlocution may be more appropriate: ‘a cognition of those identities which “are”, and “are forever”, and are “imperceptible”;’ i.e. the Ideas.25 This applies remarkably well to Coleridge’s postKantian concept of intuitive Reason. Secondly, Coleridge responds to the complexities of the Greek terms ποίησις and μουσική. Modern scholars place these concepts at the heart of Plato’s anti-poetic discourse. Ποίησις means ‘making’ and covers all the productive arts and crafts. It is the ancestor of our notion of ‘creativity’. Ποίησις had a close relationship with μουσική, a term that includes but is not confined to music: it encompasses euphony in poetry, and rhythm in gymnastics. Μουσική and ποίησις intertwined in the Greek oral culture, in the form of the drama to which citizens f locked as a religious event; and of rhapsodes’ recitations of Homer, Hesiod, and other epic poetry. (Plato’s phrase ‘μουσικήν ποιειν’ has been translated ‘practising the arts’.26) It has been convincingly argued that the main object of Plato’s attack on the poets was in fact ποίησις in this wide sense: Plato wanted to replace the irrationality of emotional performances with the ref lective rationality of the written word. The banishment of the poets, that is, must be seen in the context of the profound shift during Plato’s time, enabled by new technology, from a predominantly oral culture (ref lected for instance in Republic 603b) to an increasingly literate culture. Hence the centrality of reform in education (παιδεία) in the Republic. Homer is said to be the poet who ‘educated Greece’:27 that children learned Homer by rote for information

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in religious and technical matters Plato regards as unphilosophical and corrupting.28 A comment in Protagoras sketches this conventional method of education: children are given the works of good poets to read at their desks and have to learn them by heart, works that contain numerous exhortations, many passages describing in glowing terms good men of old, so that the child is inspired to imitate them and become like them.29

Put like this, it could sound unobjectionable enough, but Plato has the character Adei­mantus describe the disadvantage of this procedure in the Republic: it en­cour­ ages a kind of opportunistic eclecticism in the young men’s attitude to moral con­ duct, based on chance quotations of Homer and Hesiod to the effect that justice is arduous and unrewarding.30 I elaborate on Plato’s attacks on poetry below. Here I wish to note, first, that Coleridge ‘cherished a wish’ to institute a term as nearly equivalent as possible to ποίησις to encompass the arts in this wide, Greek sense: ‘poesy’;31 and second, that he approves Socrates’ statement in Republic that the guardians must take particular care to prevent any novelties in μουσική. Socrates and his interlocutor agree that μουσική can be a particularly insidious vehicle of lawlessness since it is popularly considered mere harmless play. Yet becoming familiar by degrees it insensibly runs into the manners and pursuits; and from thence, in intercourse of dealings one with another, it becomes greater; and from this intercourse it enters into laws and policies with much impudence, Socrates, till at last it overturns all things, both public and private.32

Coleridge’s comment catches the spirit of this passage, giving μουσική the widest possible signification: ‘Most singular and weighty remark — but what are we to understand by Music? I answer — all the pleasures of Taste; imprimis — and explicitly. Implicitè autem, the Rhythm, the Tune, of a Nation’s Thoughts — ’.33 Coleridge then quotes two further sentences, to the effect that novelties in μουσική are dangerous, and never occur without change to the laws of a city. That Coleridge saw deep contemporary relevance in this observation is shown by the fact that he also cited it in his letter to Lord Liverpool in which he urges the need for philosophy to guide statecraft.34 Novelties in μουσική, Coleridge seems to agree with Socrates, infiltrate every level of society, and so must be controlled from the top: by Reason in the individual, by the governors in a state. Whilst endorsing the wide signification of Plato’s term μουσική, Coleridge adds that ‘Fact bears Plato out even in Music, in its stricter or narrower sense as Metre and Tune’, including even ‘the rhythm of Prose’, which in English has been corrupted by French inf luence.35 Given Coleridge’s sensitivity to Plato’s terms, then, I use the word ‘poetry’ with the full connotations of ποίησις. This chapter proceeds in four further sections. First, I sketch Plato’s hostility to mimetic poetry and its possible corrupting effects, alongside Coleridge’s comparable hostility to a similar phenomenon in his own time. Secondly, I discuss the later, Neoplatonic defence of mimetic art as imitating the Ideas rather than objects of sense-perception: I describe how this line of thought was teased out of Plato’s works themselves, particularly the Timaeus’s account of the Demiurge’s act of creation. Coleridge, I show, picked up this defence through Plotinus and

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Schelling, assimilating it to his own experience of the struggle involved in poetic composition. Thirdly, I come to Plato’s second model for poetic production (apart from mimesis): divine inspiration. Focusing on the Socratic dialogue Ion, I note that Plato’s attitude to inspiration is, like that of mimesis, explicitly negative, but with positive implications based on the possibility of rationally scrutinizing the utterances of the inspired poet or rhapsode. Again I compare Coleridge’s suggestive thoughts on the question of divine inspiration, in his case in a Christian context. Fourth and last, I tie the two Platonic models of mimesis and inspiration together in a reading of the poem ‘Kubla Khan’, with its Demiurge-like creator, inspired poet, and ironically critical Preface. Poetic Mimesis: Coleridgean Echoes of Plato’s Attack In Plato’s writings are to be found two models of poetic production (which are, with the single exception of Laws 719c–d, never treated together): mimesis and inspiration. Both are hostile models, albeit with sufficient saving clauses for a long Neoplatonic tradition to have portrayed Plato as a champion of poetry. In the Republic Socrates describes poetry as mimetic, attacking it from this basis in books two, three, and ten. Three basic charges are made: poetry is impious, propagating lies about the gods; it stirs up undisciplined emotion, encouraging the listener (for this is an oral culture) to imitate bad passions; and it is epistemologically suspect, being a ‘copy’ at two removes from the Ideas which are truly real. Though these can be treated as discrete points, they are united by two fears: of the unphilosophical irrationality of popular culture, and, congruently, of the moral effects of poetry on the mind of audiences. These are preoccupations Coleridge emphatically shares. First, then, Socrates insists that, like bad craftsmen who cannot copy a model properly, poets misrepresent the gods, who are in reality good and unchanging, as passionate and fickle.36 Coleridge’s frequent comparisons of religion with poetry (‘I have often thought that religion [. . .] is the poetry of mankind’37) align him with this view: he too believes that poetry is integral to the upholding of true religion, and when abused, corrodes it. Hence his attack, in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists, on Lucretian poetry which is ostensibly philosophical, but actually undermines divine truth: I have heard it said that an undevout astronomer is mad. [. . .] Much more truly, however, might it be said that, an undevout poet is mad: in the strict sense of the word, an undevout poet is an impossibility. I have heard of verse-makers (poets they are not, and can never be) who introduced into their works such questions as these: — Whether the world was made of atoms? — Whether there is a universe? — Whether there is a governing mind that supports it? As I have said, verse-makers are not poets: the poet is one who carries the simplicity of childhood into the powers of manhood; who, with a soul unsubdued by habit, unshackled by custom, contemplates all things with the freshness and the wonder of a child; and, connecting with it the inquisitive power of riper years, adds, as far as he can find knowledge, admiration; and, where knowledge no longer permits admiration, gladly sinks back again into the childlike feeling of devout wonder.38

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Coleridge may have in mind such poets as Erasmus Darwin, whose epic verse wittily promotes a mechanistic world-view. The conceptual basis of the argument, however, resembles Socrates’: that the divine is to be identified with the Good, whereas so-called poets deny divinity or portray it sceptically. Coleridge is further suggesting that the intellectual sophistication of verse-makers precludes the proper wonder of the philosopher who knows his own ignorance; the habit-purging ‘feeling of divine wonder’ being exactly what he associates with Socrates and Plato. This comparison needs a qualification, certainly: whereas Coleridge is attacking bad poets (thus his memo to write ‘Of the harm that bad Poets do in stealing & making unnovel beautiful Images’39), Socrates is attacking those normally considered greatest, chief ly Homer. The views of Socrates and Coleridge are therefore not perfectly symmetrical. There is, though, a substantial parallel, neatly apparent in their respective invocations of the shape-shifting god Proteus, who seems a natural test case for poetic representation, given the possibilities of mythologizing him as one or many or both simultaneously. Socrates complains of the poets’ lies about Proteus.40 According to him, gods are unchanging (a view of divinity that prefigures the theory of Ideas developed later in the Republic41), whereas the poets themselves, like the Proteus of their lies, change their identity with every character they create. When Coleridge describes Shakespeare as a Proteus-figure because he ‘darts himself forth’ to animate myriad characters, this might sound like exactly what Socrates objects to about dramatists. Yet Coleridge takes for granted that a divinity should retain a constant identity: Proteus-Shakespeare ‘becomes all things, yet forever remaining himself ’.42 That Coleridge, contra Plato, is able to attribute this essential changelessness to the poet, is in fact consistent with the ‘higher’ view of mimesis hinted at by Plato, as I discuss below: Plato no less than Coleridge distinguishes good from bad poetry and poets. Socrates’ second criticism, that poetry tends to stir up excessive and harmful emotion, relates especially to the performance-culture of his day, but remains a deep anxiety with Coleridge. The censure can be divided into two parts. First, Socrates is concerned that auditors of rhapsodic and tragic performances will imitate the bad passions represented there, inducing cowardice and lack of self-control. The mimetic chain would resemble the chain of inspiration imagined in Ion: poets imitate people who are mad, bad, and dangerous to know; the auditors imitate the poets’ imitations; and the cycle continues. The poet pleases the theatregoing crowd by imitating weak and irrational characters, since those are most familiar to the crowd: he therefore ‘excites and nourished this [worst] part of the soul, and, strengthening it, destroys the rational’.43 Comparable is Coleridge’s loathing of what the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads attacks as ‘sickly and stupid German Tragedies’. He claims that ‘the so called German drama’, better named the ‘jacobinical drama’, is itself feebly imitative.44 Worse, tragedies such as Maturin’s Bertram are sensationalist, over-stimulating the mind of the audience so that it craves more, literally a vicious circle. Watching the crowd’s rapturous approval of a bad character Coleridge ref lects: ‘The familiarity with atrocious events and characters appeared to have poisoned the taste, even where it had not directly disorganized the moral principles, and left the feelings callous

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to all the mild appeals, and craving alone for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants’.45 This link between taste, moral principles, and habit is very similar to that made by Socrates, who fears that drama can ‘create in our youth a powerful habit of wickedness’ (πονηρίας).46 It would be dangerous for them to begin to enjoy imitating bad models: for ‘imitations, if from earliest youth they be continued onwards for a long time, are established into the manners and natural temper, both with reference to the body and voice, and likewise the dianoetic power’.47 In Coleridge’s words: ‘[w]e insensibly imitate what we habitually admire’.48 The habit of inward (dis)harmony is no less key to the second part of Socrates’ objection that poetry stirs up bad emotion. Explaining his apparently odd question whether the guardians should be imitative (μιμητικούς) or not,49 Socrates repeats the principle that each individual should follow one occupation, since if dispersed among many, (s)he will fail in all. We cannot play a serious part in life while imitating the vicissitudes of fictional characters, whether as actors or enthusiastic spectators.50 So too Coleridge attacks the self-dispersal involved in habitual novelreading: the reverse side of the coin to his praise of Platonic philosophy as never allowing the mind to depart from itself. Novels which pretend to moral propriety, such as Richardson’s Clarissa or Pamela, in fact encourage the mind to dwell on the various ‘criminal’ indulgences they describe: ‘they poison the imagination of the young with continued doses of tinct. Lyttae’ (an aphrodisiac). Coleridge contrasts Fielding’s Tom Jones, a novel often wrongly ‘censured as loose’: ‘There is a cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere, strongly contrasted with the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson’.51 Could this be a Platonic breeze? It is Socrates who says that artists must be sought who can discern the true nature of the beautiful, that our youth, dwelling as it were in a healthful place, may be profited on all sides; whence, from the beautiful works, something will be conveyed to the sight and hearing, as a breeze bringing health from salutary places; im­per­ ceptibly leading them on directly from childhood, to the resemblance, friend­ ship, and harmony with right reason.52

Both Coleridge and Plato assert the need for a kind of active energy in the production and consumption of art, deploring its lack in the majority of works. The third prong of Socrates’ attack on poetry is epistemological: mimetic repre­ sentations occur at two removes from reality. This assertion appears in book 10, at some distance from the criticism of poetry in books 2–3:53 it is enabled by the theory of Ideas developed in the intervening books. Socrates isolates three levels of reality, which correspond to the three levels of the soul, τὸ λογιστικόν (the reasoning part), τὸ θυμοειδές (the spirited part), τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν (the desiring part).54 Objects — he gives the examples of a bed and a chair — have three manifestations: the Idea of the bed, made by God;55 the physical bed made by the carpenter; the copy of the bed made by a painter or, by extension, mimetic poet. The implication drawn is that the poet, operating on the lowest level of reality, appeals habitually to the basest element of the soul. Moreover, poets have no real knowledge, otherwise they would really construct the bed instead of merely representing it; Homer would have become a statesman instead of writing about statecraft.

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Coleridge agrees about the worthlessness of a mere copy: ‘a good Portrait [. . .] becomes more and more like in proportion to its excellence as a Work of Art — While a real Copy, a Fac Simile, ends in shocking us’.56 This is at the root of his objection in Biographia to Wordsworth’s aim of imitating ‘the real language of men’ in poetry, which Coleridge interprets with polemical literalness as ‘a language taken [. . .] from the mouths of men in real life’.57 The absurdity of the notion of the poet providing transcripts of rustic conversation provides a platform for Coleridge to desynonymize the terms ‘copy’ and ‘imitation’; the former a precise and overly particular reproduction of its original, the latter capturing the spirit of the original and therefore fulfilling Aristotle’s dictum that ‘poetry is essentially ideal’.58 Mimesis as Imitation of Ideas: the Neoplatonic Defence The desynonymy of imitation from copy to denote a superior model of poetic mimesis was long central to Coleridge’s criticism,59 but the distinction is already present in Plato. A clear example occurs in Cratylus, when Socrates declares that it is not ‘necessary to attribute to an image [εἰκόν] every thing belonging to that which it represents, in order to its becoming an image [. . .] it does not necessarily follow, that if anything is taken away or added, it will no longer be an image’.60 For the image to be interesting (or tasteful, in Coleridgean terms), it must in some respect differ from its original. The great range of contexts for Plato’s use of the concept of imitation throughout the dialogues, indeed, cumulatively implies this desynonymy: our thoughts and arguments are imitations of reality (Timaeus 47b–c; Critias 107b–c); words are imitations of things (Cratylus 423e–424b); sounds imitate divine harmony (Timaeus 80b); time imitates eternity (Timaeus 38a); laws imitate truth (Politicus 300c); human governments imitate true government (Politicus 293e); devout men try to imitate their gods (Phaedrus 252c–d, 253b; Laws 713e); and most importantly for the present context, visible figures are imitations of eternal ones (Timaeus 50c). In each of these cases it is not conceivable that ‘imitation’ is intended as the attempt at precise reproduction which Socrates ascribes to the poets. W. J. Verdenius (from whom I draw these examples) sums up in Coleridgean language: ‘This is sufficient proof that Platonic imitation is bound up with the idea of approximation and does not mean a true copy’.61 That is not to claim that Plato valorizes difference in these instances — quite the reverse, given the hierarchical view of reality they ref lect. Yet there are hints in Plato from which can be constructed a defence of mimetic art as willed imitation, rather than passive copy. One of Socrates’ leading questions about the method of the painter constitutes just such a hint: ‘Do you think he tries in each case to imitate the thing itself in nature or the works of craftsmen?’62 Glaucon replies on cue that painters copy the creations of artificers; but he might have answered that they can imitate the Ideas. It is in fact via this possibility that writers since at least the time of Cicero have elevated poetry from the mediocre and dangerous activity condemned by Socrates into the means of contemplating the highest reality.63 Moreover, defenders of this view were able to look to a model already present in Plato’s writing. For Timaeus relates that the Demiurge (δημιουργός translates as

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‘craftsman’) fashioned the world by looking, not to a changeable pattern (παραδειγμά), which would be a blasphemous notion (and paradoxical, for how could a generated model previously have existed?), but to an eternal one — generally identified with the Ideas spoken of in other dialogues. For this reason, Timaeus says, the world is the fairest of all things that have come into being, although imperfection lingers since the Demiurge is not omnipotent.64 The Demiurge (as Iris Murdoch writes) is ‘Plato’s portrait of the artist and a most attractive figure’.65 Plotinus takes up this notion to defend and exalt art — ‘art’ for Plotinus being τέχνη, precisely the status that Socrates had denied to ποίησις. He imagines two blocks of stone lying side-by-side, one a crude lump, the other sculpted into a statue of a god or man by a craftsman (δημιουργός). In both cases the material is the same, yet we find the latter beautiful, the former not. This must be due to something that does not reside in the material: that is the ‘forming principle’ (λόγον οῦ ποιεῖ) introduced by the art. What we behold in the statue, however, is not the pure Idea of beauty, but beauty only ‘as far as the stone has submitted to the art’.66 The example of a statue (ἄγαλμα, which also means ‘image’) is not arbitrary, since statues were sacred objects into which the spirit of a god or great man was thought to enter; thus Plato describes the universe fashioned by the demiurge as τῶν ἀιδίων θεῶν γεγονὸς ἄγαλμα, which has been translated both ‘a shrine brought into being for the everlasting gods’ and ‘a created image of the everlasting gods’.67 To keep both meanings in mind at once is to see how Plotinus builds on a regard for art as sacred which is already present potentially in Plato. So Plotinus, disputing Plato’s explicit condemnation of mimetic art, insists that ‘the arts do not simply imitate [nature], but they run back up to (ἀνατρέχουσιν) the forming principles (λόγους) from which nature derives’.68 Admittedly this Neoplatonic defence of poetry finds few modern supporters: Iris Murdoch, for instance, writes that [t]he tempting correction [to the Republic’s disparaging concept of mimetic art] was made by Plotinus when he suggested that the artist does not copy the material object but copies the Form: a view which on examination turns out to be even more unsatisfactory.69

She does not elaborate on this ‘examination’, but it probably has to do with her conviction that the doctrine of Ideas is incoherent, precisely because it relies on a metaphor of ‘imitation’ that she finds basically unsatisfying.70 Coleridge, on the other hand, as I have already discussed in Chapter 2, adhered even in the teeth of Kant’s Critiques to a notion of ‘constitutive Ideas’, and appealed to Plotinus on beauty in the Principles of Genial Criticism and Biographia Literaria. Indeed Plotinus’ views, first that art imitates the very Ideas from which natural phenomena themselves derive, and second, that a particular work of art never attains the perfect beauty of the forming principle (λόγος) itself because the material only ever partially ‘submits’ to the art, appealed in a poetic context both to Schelling and (partly via Schelling) to Coleridge. Coleridge referred to Plotinus on beauty in the Principles of Genial Criticism, as discussed in Chapter 2, above. These views also inform Coleridge’s practical criticism of Shakespeare, especially in his insistence that critics such as Johnson are at fault for isolating particular beauties and defects in

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each play without taking proper account of the informing Idea, the ‘distinct object’ of the whole. So Coleridge exclaims to his notebook that it is absurd to measure black spots against white in a work of art, for The Poet & his Subject, are they not as the Δημιουργος & υλή of Plato — If the υλη were not of itself reluctant & naked & ungratifying, what need of the Demiurge — and tho’ he may hinder this, & alter it, & form, & educe perpetual good even out of the worst evil, can he annihilate the υλη without evanishment of the ιδεα? — 71

Plato does not actually use the word ὑλή (‘wood’, in its original meaning, but it came to signify ‘prime matter’, as opposed to the intelligent formative principle, reason or νοῦς) to describe the Receptacle (ὑποδοχἠν) upon which the Demiurge imprints his creation;72 this is instead a Neoplatonic term consonant with Plotinus’ emphasis on the struggle of a craftsman to subdue recalcitrant material. Thus Henry More defines it with vivid imprecision as ‘Hyle, Materia Prima, or that dark f luid potentiality of the creature, the straitnesse, repugnancy, and incapacity of the creature: as when its being this, destroyes or debilitates the capacity of being something else, or after some other manner’.73 It remains an open question whether, as the Neoplatonists held, Plato taught that matter is the principle of evil. Coleridge, at any rate, supported this interpretation of Plato, and came to adopt similar language himself in his later Genesis-based speculations about the creation of the universe.74 The association Coleridge makes between ὑλή and evil is thus strictly speaking Neoplatonic rather than Platonic; but it does satisfyingly ref lect Timaeus’ doctrine that ‘this universe was fashioned in the beginning by the victory of reasonable persuasion over Necessity’. ‘Necessity’ (ἀνάγκη) refers not to natural laws but rather to the opposite, a chaotic factor that exists in the world at all times and can be ‘persuaded’ yet never abolished by reason.75 In this light Coleridge’s suggestion becomes clear, that the Demiurge-poet cannot ‘annihilate the υλη without evanishment of the ιδεα’.76 Struggle, for Coleridge, is integral to the process of composition. The rhythm of the above-quoted Notebook entry embodies the poet’s sometimes frustrating search for words to embody an Idea: the ὑλη, whose qualities are evoked in ponderous polysyllables (‘reluctant & naked & ungratifying’) is assailed by the nimble activity of the poet (‘alter it, & form, & educe’). Activity, indeed, is the defining facet of the Demiurge-poet: just as for Plato the Demiurge is (unlike Jehovah!) without jealousy and exercises a benevolent will (βουλήσεως) in creating, so Coleridge’s equable man of genius possesses ‘an endless power of combining and modifying’ ideas.77 This is Coleridge’s equally Platonic reply to Plato’s accusation that poets are passive imitators of inferior things: the work of art on the contrary is valuable in so far as it has cognitive content, infused by the poet’s active ‘struggle’ to stamp an Idea on intractable material. Thus the secondary Imagination is ‘co-existent with the conscious will’; it ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered im­possible, yet at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify’.78 The Demiurge’s fid­elity to Reason in his struggle to create good things informs Coleridge’s persis­ tent defence of poetry:

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Idly talk they who speak of Poets as mere Indulgers of Fancy, Imagination, Superstition, &c — They are the Bridlers by Delight, the Purifiers, they that combine them with reason & order, the true Protoplasts, Gods of Love who tame the Chaos.79

The Ancient Quarrel can potentially be reconciled by virtue of the true poet’s philosophical activity of willing: ‘a Poet cannot be a great Poet but as being likewise & inclusively an Historian and Naturalist in the Light as well as the Life of Philosophy. All other men’s Worlds (κοσμοι) are his Chaos’.80 This implies that the poet finds his raw materials in the world that the non-poet regards as simply given. In his last years Coleridge was to develop this interest into rich speculations on the Mosaic account of creation.81 The quotations just cited, however, are closer to Schelling’s notion that the work of art as a product of the creative imagination is a ‘Begrenzung’ [boundary] of the ‘Chaos’ of the Absolute: Chaos, for Schelling, is not simply negation of form, but rather the paradox that all possible form exists together, undifferentiated. ‘Ohne Begrenzung könnte das Grenzenlose nicht erscheinen’ [Without a boundary the boundless could not appear].82 Schelling, indeed, developing Plotinus’ notion that art ‘runs back up to’ the Ideas, produced in Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur (1807) an account of mimesis which Coleridge took up enthusiastically.83 Schelling dismisses ‘dienstbare Nachahmung’ [servile imitation] with the ethical argument used also by Plato and Coleridge, that such copyists more often and with greater inclination prefer ‘das Häßliche’ [the ugly] to ‘das Schöne’ [the beautiful].84 (Earlier Schelling had offered an interpretation of Plato’s banishment of the poets as ‘Polemik gegen den poetischen Realismus’ [polemic against poetic realism].85) If servile copying constitutes unacceptable immersion in material particularity, however, ancient attempts to imitate the Idea of Beauty itself were, on the other hand, ‘wie schöne Worte, denen die Taten nicht entsprechen’ [like fine words to which the deeds do not conform].86 What is required is a ‘lebendige Mitte’ [living middle] between these extremes: one contemplates nature, then withdraws from it, distancing oneself from the product (natura naturata) in order to grasp the creative power (natura naturans) at work in producing, before finally ‘returning’ to nature.87 The possibility of such a process of withdrawal and re-engagement presupposes that the human mind shares a common ground with nature. In Coleridge’s compressed summary for the lecture ‘On Poesy or Art’ (1819): If the Artist painfully copies nature, what an idle rivalry! If he proceeds from a Form, that answers to the notion of Beauty, namely, the many seen as one — what an emptiness, an unreality — as in Cypriani — The essence must be mastered — the natura naturans, & this presupposes a bond between Nature in this higher sense and the soul of Man — .88

Coleridge’s self-exhortation that the essence (the natura naturans) ‘must be mastered’ lays exactly that stress on Will which we have already seen to be characteristic of his defence of poetry. His next point is that although the ‘same powers’ appear in both man and nature, ‘there is no ref lex act’ in nature, so that the latter acts ‘without ref lection, and consequently without Morality’. In nature, ‘Plan and Execution’ are simultaneous; in man, creation is informed by ‘ref lection’. This notion is very

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close to Schelling, but also to the account of ‘plastick nature’ in Cudworth’s True Intellectual System:89 Cudworth concludes that although nature is in one sense a more perfect artist than the human being, able to do without the laborious ‘knockings and thrustings’ of human work, it is inferior in the sense that it is not ‘master of that wisdom according to which it acts, but only a servant to it, and drudging executioner of the same’.90 The essential difference of Coleridge’s lecture ‘On Poesy or Art’ from Schelling’s essay lies in the fact that ‘Schelling’s ideas provided Coleridge with nothing to correspond to his own concern with the act of will’.91 One telling local example of this is that whereas Schelling writes, ‘every creature of nature has but one moment of the true perfection of beauty’ (‘ein jedes Gewächs der Natur [hat] nur einen Augenblick der wahren vollendeten Schönheit’), Coleridge puts the emphasis on Will: ‘Each thing, that lives, has its moment of self-exposition’.92 To sum up my argument so far: Plato’s condemnation of poetic mimesis resonated with Coleridge’s apprehension regarding the dangerous irrationality of bad art, which he, like Plato, saw as intoxicating when consumed by a passive public. The Neoplatonic defence of art as imitating the Ideas, rather than sense-objects, resting as it did on the busy, benevolent figure of Plato’s Demiurge, helped Coleridge to justify ‘good’ art, because it enables an emphasis on the Will of the artist — and thus on an active mode of production and appreciation. Coleridge labels the first, passive kind of mimesis ‘copy’, and the latter, active kind ‘imitation’. Coleridge pursues this concept of Will as the ‘ground’ common to man and nature in the ‘Essays on Method’ in the 1818 Friend, and most fully and complexly in the Opus Maximum, as I discuss in Chapter 5, below. I wish now to keep in mind Coleridge’s persistent emphasis on the Will of the poet in the context of the other model for poetic production common to Coleridge and Plato: inspiration. Ion: Socrates and Coleridge on Inspiration Plato’s treatment of inspiration, as in the case of mimesis, falls into two categories: Socrates’ negative or def lationary propositions on the one hand, and on the other the positive implications of his own apparently inspired utterances. Also as with mimesis, Plato is sceptical of the value of inspiration because of its passivity: that the inspired speaker is by definition out of his or her senses casts doubt on the source and significance of the inspiration. If inspiration is to be recuperated rationally it must be by a process of after-ref lection that would be better denoted ‘philosophical’ than ‘poetic’. Again, close analogues for this kind of scepticism and recuperation are to be found in Coleridge. Coleridge’s struggles with the concept and experience of inspiration have often been considered in the context of biblical hermeneutics and sometimes of Renaissance concepts of poetic madness.93 I want to suggest that still more light is shed on Coleridge’s dilemmas by a return ad fontes, to Plato’s ambivalent presentation of inspiration.94 The passivity and hence doubtful value of poetic inspiration is emphasized in the brief, witty dialogue Ion. This emphasis is the more striking given that it was not customary to see contradiction, as Socrates does, between poets’ inspiration and the

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status of their poems as τέχνη: ‘in pre-Platonic literature poets are portrayed both as sophoi, “wise men”, who have access to knowledge through the inspiration of the Muses, and as skilled craftsmen’.95 Socrates’ key speech in Ion at once revitalizes the tradition of inspiration with its striking imagery; and def lates it with its ascription to poets of an irrationality incommensurate with τέχνη. Socrates is ostensibly explaining why the rhapsode Ion gives bravura recitations and expositions of Homer, but is at a loss to comment on other poets, and even falls asleep on hearing their poems. Socrates suggests the reason to be that Ion’s profession depends not on τέχνη, but a divine force from the Muses.96 Like a chain of magnetic rings, poet, rhapsode, and audience are bound by a chain of divine enthusiasm. Focusing increasingly on the poets and himself rising into an elevated metrical discourse, Socrates compares poets in the act of composition to wild Bacchic maidens under the inf luence of Dionysus, declaring: ‘For a poet is a thing light, and volatile, and sacred; nor is he able to write poetry, till the Muse entering into him, he is transported out of himself, and has no longer the command of his intellect’.97 Given that epic composition and recitation were both oral arts, the dialogue does not clearly distinguish the two, and Ion agrees to this last proposition of Socrates, confessing that he himself is not in his right mind when reciting Homer: his soul is carried away in an ecstasy. In the context of the dialogue this is tantamount to owning that his utterances are devoid of cognitive content; and Socrates drives home his argumentative advantage by forcing Ion to admit that he has no technical knowledge of any of the topics of Homer’s verse. In the course of this conversation Socrates also exposes Ion as a fraud. He traps Ion by asking whether during his inspired renditions he is aware of inducing similar effects of wild irrational emotion in the audience. Ion responds that he is (‘For at every striking passage I look down from my pulpit round me, and see the people suitably affected by it: now weeping, then looking as if horror seized them; such emotion and astonishment are spread through all’), and congratulates himself on provoking this response because it guarantees him payment.98 This cynical boast unwittingly reveals that while performing Ion is not enraptured by divine mania, but rather keeps his eye consciously on the audience, being concerned purely with appearances. The conclusion to the dialogue underlines this. Asked ‘Which do you prefer to be thought, dishonest or inspired?’, Ion is content to be thought inspired, thus confirming his dishonesty.99 Given the intellectual limitation and even fraudulence of his interlocutor, it is problematic to read Socrates’ central speech as a resounding affirmation of poetic inspiration. One such earnest reading (by Stolberg) prompted Goethe, in the ironically titled essay ‘Plato as comrade of a Christian revelation’, strongly to emphasize the stupidity of Ion, to the extent of denying that Socrates intends any comment on the nature of poetry: ‘Der berühmte, bewunderte, gekrönte, bezahlte Jon sollte in seiner ganzen Blöße dargestellt werden, und der Titel müßte heißen: Jon oder der beschämte Rhapsode; denn mit der Poesie hat das ganze Gespräch nichts zu thun’ [The famous, admired, crowned, paid Ion should be presented in his whole ignorance, and the title ought to read: Ion or the shamed rhapsode; for the whole dialogue has nothing to do with poetry].100 As in several dialogues, insists Goethe, Socrates speaks ‘nur ironisch’ [only ironically].

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Yet the irony, though undeniable, is far from straightforward, given that Socrates’ speech on inspiration is structurally central, elevated in tone and imagery, and contrasts strikingly with the teasing mockery to which he subjects Ion throughout the rest of the dialogue. Dramatically, too, Ion’s reaction seems to enact the truth of Socrates’ assertion of the mesmerizing effect of inspired utterance on the auditor: he replies, ‘ἄπτει γάρ πώς μου τοῖς λόγοις τῆς ψυχῆς’ [I feel as it were in my very soul, Socrates, the truth of what you say]: ‘very strong and significant’ words, as Floyer Sydenham noted.101 So, amplifying Goethe’s comment, it would be misleading to call this irony in the simple sense of saying one thing but evidently meaning something different. Vlastos’s distinction between ‘simple’ irony (using the definition just given) and ‘complex’ irony is helpful here: in complex irony the ‘surface content is meant to be true in one sense, false in another’.102 The latter more appropriately describes Socrates’ riddling mode of irony than the former, and helps to explain how Ion can dramatize both ridicule of an unintelligent performer and a serious comment on poetic production. Socrates’ irony here is not simple (in the sense of proposing that poets and rhapsodes operate by divine inspiration, while obviously meaning to undermine this proposition by applying it to Ion) but rather complex, admitting the possibility and potency of inspiration, while questioning its value: if even this hapless rhapsode can trade on inspiration, what guarantee can there be that it is a good? That it results in the irrational frenzy of the audience is, to the rational mind, a further point in its disfavour. A subsidiary implication of Socrates’ complex irony is that, because poetic inspiration lacks a cognitive dimension, it is difficult to separate it from the dishonest pretence to knowledge that Ion so crassly exemplifies. And it would not be any better if poets were to give up the claim to knowledge, since their art would then be for that very reason, on Socrates’ terms, worthless. Socrates calls the poets ‘mouthpieces’ (ἑρμηνῆς) of the Gods, a term which strongly emphasizes the passivity of transmission.103 The same point emerges from the fact that in Phaedrus Socrates asserts poetic madness to be a gift from the gods, yet places the poet only in sixth place in the hierarchy of ways of life.104 The latter evaluation does not mean that Plato wishes to present Socrates as despising poetry per se. Rather, as Verdenius explains, any such positive valuation ‘ist aber mit der Überzeugung verbunden, daß der Erkenntniswert der Poesie nur ein geringer sein kann. Dieser geringe Erkenntniswert beruht auf demselben Faktor, der im positiven Sinne den ästhetischen Wert der Poesie bestimmt, nämlich auf der Mania’ [is, however, connected with the persuasion that the cognitive worth of poetry can only be a slight one. This slight cognitive worth results from the same factor, which in the positive sense determines the aesthetic worth of poetry, i.e. mania].105 Thus when Socrates calls poetry or the poet ‘divine’, we should not rush to characterize this as either total approbation or simple irony: this attribution of divine status ‘steht nicht im Widerspruch zu der Kritik, die Platon an der Dichtung übt, denn das Wort θεῖος impliziert nicht immer “gut” oder “absolut”, sondern bedeutet nur, was das Alltägliche übersteigt’ [does not stand in contradiction to the criticism which Plato makes of literature, for the word θεῖος does not always imply ‘good’ or ‘absolute’, but rather means only that which goes beyond the everyday].106

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Indeed in Phaedrus Socrates makes explicit what was implicit in Ion, that there is a good and a bad kind of inspiration: ‘there are two species of mania; the one arising from human diseases; but the other from a divine mutation, taking place in a manner different from established customs’.107 Coleridge approaches this distinction in his desynonymization of enthusiasm and fanaticism; like Socrates he discerns Two kinds of Madness — the Insania pseudo-poetica, i.e. nonsense conveyed in strange and unusual Language, the malice prepense of vanity, or an inf lammation from debility — and this is degenerate/the other the Furor divinus, in which the mind by infusion of a celestial Health supra hominis naturam erigitur et in Deum transit — and this is Surgeneration, which only the Regenerate can properly appreciate.108

The word ‘appreciate’, suggesting a rational, critical activity, is quietly key in this formulation. Both Plato and Coleridge emphasize the necessity of critically sifting inspired utterances. In Plato’s case this is well exemplified by two statements occurring in fairly close proximity in the Laws. The Athenian Stranger declares first that ‘poets as a class (τὸ ποιητικόν) are divinely gifted and are inspired when they sing, so that with the help of Graces and Muses they frequently hit on how things really happen’.109 But afterwards he continues that ‘a poet, when he sits on the tripod of the muse, is not in his right senses, but, like a fountain, readily pours forth the inf lux which he has received: and that, his art being imitative, he is often compelled, when representing men that are contrary to each other, to contradict himself; and does not know whether these things, or those, are true’.110 Are these two statements mutually contradictory? They are not, I would suggest, if Socrates’ own distinction between good and bad inspiration is taken into account. This distinction, implicit in Ion, is presented clearly in Socrates’ two speeches in Phaedrus. During the first speech (designed to persuade a boy to accept a nonlover instead of someone who is really in love), Socrates begins speaking in verse: first dithyrambic and then heroic, as he says. He represents himself as inspired, fearing that if he continues the speech he will lose all rational control: ‘Do you not perceive that, being then urged by you, and assisted by Providence, I should be most evidently agitated by the fury of the Nymphs?’111 Ironic though this remark is, since in a sense it continues the amatory insinuation of the preceding speech by recalling attention to Phaedrus’ beauty, it is the prelude to a critical examination of the ‘inspired’ speech. Warned by his mysterious daemonic sign, Socrates decides that the speech was in fact impious towards the divinity of love. (Coleridge, who in the Philosophical Lectures speculates on the nature of Socrates’ daemon, sometimes claims to undergo a similar experience, as when he breaks off a discussion of the Day of Judgement ‘warned from within and from without, that it is profanation to speak of these mysteries’.112) Socrates then attempts to redeem himself through the second speech. This speech appears prima facie entirely earnest. In elevated language, similar to though more sustained than that of the central speech in Ion,113 Socrates praises divine madness and discerns four types of it: mantic, telestic, poetic, and erotic. Hence Ficino, who regards poetic madness as both thematically central to the Phaedrus and instrumental in its composition, harmonizes this description with the statements on inspiration in Ion and Meno, to expound Plato’s ‘doctrine of mania’.114

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However, irony is detectable in this second speech of Socrates too. The ref lexivity of Socrates’ praise of mania while in a state of mania himself is one signal of this;115 and two further ironies in particular are noteworthy. First, Socrates elaborately frames the speech by attributing it to the poet Stesichorus (and retrospectively attributing the earlier speech to Phaedrus the Myrrhinusian). The first words of the speech are in fact a quotation from Stesichorus: ‘False is the tale [. . .]’. As the poet Gray pointed out, ‘It is observable that Socrates whenever he would discourse affirmatively on any subject, or when he thought proper to raise or adorn his style, does it not in his own person, but assumes the character of another’.116 Second, just as after the first speech, Socrates afterwards comments on the mental state in which he gave it: he even pretends that his rapture was so powerful that he can no longer remember what he said.117 If this second speech constituted a recantation of the first, he now offers an ambiguous recantation of this one in turn: And I know not how, while we are representing by images the amatory passion, we perhaps touch upon a certain truth; and perhaps we are at the same time hurried away elsewhere. Hence, mingling together an oration not perfectly improbable [οὐ παντάπασιν ἀπίθανος], we have produced a certain fabulous hymn, and have with moderate abilities celebrated your lord and mine, Phaedrus, viz. Love.118

Such a degree of modesty appears perplexing, even given Socrates’ habitually bantering tone. The key points for my purposes are that Socrates both frames and analyses the inspired speech, ironizes it (even feigning a struggle to recollect it), and finally expresses uncertainty about its value. Tigerstedt, having elaborated on the ironic elements of the speech, asks whether we should not simply ‘follow Socrates himself in declaring the whole speech “a play” — poetry not philosophy?’119 His answer is that this is a counterintuitive response to such a sublime speech, and that we can better solve the dilemma by recalling that Socrates’ speech is a myth, and as such neither pure allegory nor pure fiction. ‘The purpose of the myth is to express what cannot be expressed by dialectic, and it does this as a persuasive rhetorical device, subordinate to dialectic rather than as an intuition transcending dialectic’.120 This seems to me true as far as it goes, but I wish to offer in addition an interpretation that I will then show to be consonant with some of Coleridge’s writing about inspiration. Socrates’ speech, taking the framing devices — the attribution to Stesichorus and the ambiguous rumination about its value — as integral parts, is indeed ironic. The mode of irony, however, is (to return to Vlastos’ terminology) ‘complex’, rather than the ‘simple’ mode implied by Tigerstedt.121 The speech is ironic because whenever a speaker ref lects on his own inspired utterance this is necessarily ironic: it is a process of setting at conscious remove thoughts which had initially possessed the speaker. Yet this would seem to be, in Socrates’ terms, exactly what is required if an inspired utterance is to be validated at all. ‘For all his, qualified, praise of enthusiasm, Socrates-Plato never becomes an irrationalist’.122 Ion’s inspiration was deemed worthless or dishonest, at any rate dangerous, because Ion was unable or unwilling to submit his own or Homer’s words to ref lective scrutiny. The same criticism could apply by extension (though Socrates is more cautious about this) to oracles, who transmit wisdom

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unconsciously from an unknown source. The lower, unsatisfactory senses of both inspiration and mimesis merge in this critique. Socrates himself, on the other hand, guarantees the value of his own inspired utterance by the act of doubting it. Such a guarantee is purchased by def lating the sublime register, but it is unavoidable if poetry is to be accorded, in Platonic terms, philosophical credentials. Socrates insists — unconventionally — on the passive, possessed nature of poetic inspiration, which is far from an active collaboration with the Muse.123 Cognitive content is infused only by subsequent ref lection. A statement by Timaeus can be taken as a partial gloss on this point: But that Divinity assigned divination [μαντικὴν] to human madness [ἀφροσύνη] may be sufficiently inferred from hence; that no one while endued with intellect [ἔννους] becomes connected with a divine and true prophecy; but this alone takes place either when the power of prudence is fettered by sleep, or suffers some mutation through disease, or a certain enthusiastic energy: it being in this case the employment of prudence [ἔμφρονος] to understand what was asserted either sleeping or waking by a prophetic or enthusiastic nature; and so to distinguish all the phantastic appearances as to be able to explain what and to whom anything of future, past, or present good is portended. But it is by no means the office of that which abides and is still about to abide in this enthusiastic energy, to judge of itself either concerning the appearances or vociferations. Hence it was well said by the ancients, that to transact and know his own concerns and himself, is alone the province of a prudent man. And on this account the law orders that the race of prophets [προφητῶν, better translated ‘interpreters’ or ‘spokesmen’] should preside as judges over divine predictions; who are indeed called by some diviners — but this in consequence of being ignorant that such men are interpreters of ænigmatical visions and predictions, and on this account should not be called diviners, but rather prophets [i.e. interpreters] of divinations.124

Although this passage explicitly asserts the need for after-ref lection on the inspired utterance, however, there is a difference between this and the process dramatized in Phaedrus. Whereas this passage, which unlike Phaedrus 265a treats inspiration through ‘enthusiastic energy’ on the same level as inspiration through bodily disease, insists that the enthusiast and the interpreter must be different people (the oracle and the priest), Socrates in Phaedrus acts as his own interpreter: the poet as philosophic critic. A little obliquely, one might see echoes of these two models in Coleridge’s critical thought. On the one hand, Biographia book two consummates his early, not entirely self-deprecating praise of Wordsworth’s genius: ‘Wordsworth descended on him, like the Γνῶθι σεαυτόν from Heaven; by shewing to him what true Poetry was, he made him know, that he himself was no Poet’ — an ambiguous compliment to pay a writer who claimed to be a man speaking to men.125 In Biographia Coleridge demonstrates that the heavenly poet needs a more rational spokesman both to guide and interpret him if he is to produce ‘the FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM’.126 Coleridge’s Wordsworth has ‘the vision and the faculty divine’, but little of the critical acumen that Coleridge claims for himself. On the other hand, Coleridge has a self-interpreting, gloss-writing persona, the desire ‘to be my own Hierocles’, to attain to ‘a notion of his notions’.127 It is this persona which

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relegates the poem ‘Kubla Khan’ to the status of ‘a vision in a dream’ and hence a ‘psychological curiosity’ — of which more shortly. The irony integral to a ref lection on an inspired utterance is extended by writing it down. If the Republic’s attack on mimetic ποίησις constitutes, as I outlined above, partly an attack on the education system of the oral culture which prescribed uncritical rote-learning of poetry, I consider the ironizing of inspiration to form part of this process. The subsequent discussion in Phaedrus contrasting the written with the spoken word introduces a further layer of framing, and hence irony, in Socrates’ speeches: they have been remembered and re-composed by Plato, thus setting the moment of irrational inspiration at yet a further remove. I have already indicated the similarity between Plato’s and Coleridge’s concern with the difficult task of rationally validating inspired utterance, to endorse poetry through philosophy. This is a further manifestation of Coleridge’s doublemindedness, since as Burwick aptly puts it: ‘In his intellectual struggle to resolve the dilemma of the “mad rhapsodist” Coleridge wanted to have it both ways. He wanted to affirm the creative capacities of intuition and imagination without denying divine agency’.128 On the one hand, he was attracted to the Ficinian tradition which saw a genuine ‘doctrine of mania’ in Phaedrus and Ion, and which seems to find con­summate expression in Shakespeare’s lines, ‘The Lunaticke, the Lover, and the Poet, | Are of imagination all compact’. On the other hand, Coleridge would surely have resisted the popular assumption that these lines represent Shakespeare’s defence of his own imaginative art. He probably appreciated the irony that Shakespeare gives this speech to a sceptic (Duke Theseus);129 an irony that is ‘complex’ much in Vlastos’ sense. For he inferred enough care in Shakespeare’s composition to insist that ‘Shakespeare was no passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not possessing it’: the constant keynote of his Shakespeare criticism is the appreciation of Shakespeare’s judgement over his genius, his facility of active ‘meditation’ above and beyond passive ‘observation’.130 Shakespeare’s feelings were crucially ‘under the command of his own Will’.131 For like Plato, Coleridge regards the unwilled nature of inspiration as problematic. There is admittedly a specifically Christian and therefore post-Platonic dimension to Coleridge’s concern, which became explicit in Confessions of an In­quiring Spirit: the question of inspiration is central to the status of the Bible. In Con­fessions, however, Coleridge argues that inspiration ‘in the sense of Information mira­cu­ lously communicated by Voice or Vision’ is by itself useless, for it extinguishes the congenial humanity of the prophets without which they would lack common ground for communicating with readers. Coleridge therefore wishes to redefine inspiration to denote when ‘the Writer or Speaker uses and applies his existing Gifts of Power and Knowledge under the predisposing, aiding & directing actuation of God’s Holy Spirit’.132 The majority of the Bible is not dictated by God, therefore not infallible; but it is the exclusively human process of after-ref lection which ensures its value — a process continued through centuries of Church tradition. Behind this commonsensical-sounding solution lies, as Anthony Harding has demonstrated, an extensive field of Romantic thought about inspiration. From Coleridge’s perspective, the inspired quality of Scripture was vindicated by the

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tradition of commentary which followed, and the continuing response of readers within that tradition. The random inspiration of a Brothers or a Southcott on the other hand, lacking a normative tradition to support it, would be in Coleridge’s terms mere fanaticism: as with that other crowd-puller Ion, the doubt about the genuineness of their prophecies mingles inevitably with a doubt as to their honesty. The problem of distinguishing true from false inspiration agitated those Romantic poets, as Harding points out, who wanted to recover the Miltonic, vates tradition of the inspired singer. Besides attempting to take on the role of inspired seer, Harding writes, they also ‘had to act as their own normative tradition, their own “church”, in judging the fitness of their work to be received into the canon of inspired utterance’.133 Important is not so much the fact of inspiration itself, but the willed ref lection on it: ‘To have been inspired is not trivial, but it is not everything. What is much more important is to decide what it means to have been inspired’.134 Harding explains this through the Romantic sense of belatedness; as Collins had asked in ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’, ‘Where is the bard whose soul can now | Its high presuming hopes avow?’ This belatedness, the (in Schiller’s sense) sentimental situation of the poet always nostalgic for but unable to recapture the immediacy of naive utterance, produces irony. Yet this irony, far from being purely a post-Miltonic phenomenon, was already audible in Plato; and Coleridge detected it also in at least one later writer, Böhme. (As I described in Chapter 1, Coleridge recognized substantial affinities between Plato and Böhme, though the irony that is conscious in the founder of the Academy is less likely to be so in the unlearned cobbler.) Böhme wrote of having experienced an essential vision in a quarter of an hour, of which he claimed his entire work thereafter was an ‘unfolding’: ‘For I had a thorough View of the Universe, as in a Chaos, wherein all Things are couched and wrapped up, but it was impossible for me to explain the same’. Coleridge underlines the word ‘explain’, commenting in the margin: explicate, develope, unfold — Germanicè auseinandersetzen. When a modern Orthodoxist of the Protestant Arminian Church will explain to me what he means by Inspiration, Inspired Penmen, Inspired Writ, &c, by something more than by synonimes — i.e. when he explains and not merely construes the words by help of Entick’s English Dictionary — then I will tell him whether I think Behmen’s Writings, or the Author, inspired — or any portion of the former grounded in unaided & partial recollections of inspired Truths: for as such, the Author himself offers them to us — & therefore as not infallible.135

Coleridge’s phrasing is almost litigiously convoluted, but given that he believes Böhme’s writing to be neither ventriloquistic (dictated by God) nor fraudulent, he must be suggesting that its value derives from the effort of recollection — that Platonic concept again — which is always partial. To have perceived inspired truth (beheld the Ideas, as in the myth of pre-existence in Phaedrus, or the pregnant ‘Chaos’ of Böhme) is not everything: a willed, philosophical unfolding, ‘unaided’ by divine prompting, must follow. The insufficiency of inspiration by itself is evoked by Coleridge’s sceptical but tortured rhetorical question: If a man could pass thro’ Paradise in a Dream, & have a f lower presented to

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Coleridge had in fact already posed this question in ‘Kubla Khan’. Demiurge Kubla Ever since ‘Kubla Khan’, readers and writers have been fascinated by its figuration of inspiration.137 I want now to read the poem and its Preface in terms of the two Platonic models for poetic production I have so far discussed separately: the demiurgic mimesis, and inspiration. The poem has, as W. J. Bate observes, a two-part structure frequently seen in Romantic odes. The first part, the ‘odal hymn’, presents a ‘challenge, ideal, or prototype that the poet hopes to reach or transcend’; the second part, ‘proceeding from that challenge’, forms a concluding ‘credo’, a ‘personal [expression] of hope or ambition’.138 That is to say, lines 1–36 describe Kubla’s creativity, while the final eighteen lines hope for a creativity in the poet which would be analogous; or perhaps more than analogous, identical, since he hopes to ‘build that dome in air’ (italics added), the very dome that Kubla decrees. There is a difference, however: the difference between building and decreeing. Coleridge’s source for the first few lines, Purchas His Pilgrimage, says simply: ‘In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace’, whereas Coleridge inserts an emphasis on will (‘decree’), which makes it more like the divine Fiat.139 (Perhaps Robert Browning was thinking of this in a poem behind which ‘Kubla Khan’ stirs, ‘Abt Vogler’: ‘But here is the finger of God, a f lash of the will that can, | Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!’:140 the otherwise awkwardly placed word ‘can’ might work as a pun on ‘Kubla Khan’, since Coleridge’s circle would have pronounced it that way.141 Kubla’s power is such that he can.) Kubla decrees order in the aboriginal chaos, creates a paradise where there was nothing but ‘fertile ground’. The poet, on the other hand, will have to ‘build’ the dome, which suggests the same task undertaken with more effort. Seeing the divine Fiat in Kubla’s decree raises the temptation of reading forward in Coleridge’s work to the primary imagination as ‘a repetition in the finite mind in the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ and the secondary, poetic imagination as a willed ‘echo’ of this.142 However, this is not a satisfying equation, not least because the manner and result of Kubla’s creation of his paradise are in fact far removed from anything likely to be attributed to the Christian logos. Rather his creation is ‘an order to tame what he perceives as disorder, enacting the desire for mastery over natural multiplicity which is figured in the cultivated formality of his pleasure-dome gardens’;143 while the chaos of unsculpted nature continues to loom outside the walls, in the form of a ‘savage place’ impervious to Kubla’s desires (and perhaps ‘forests ancient as the hills’ might remind us of ὑλή in its root meaning of ‘wood’). This paradise, moreover, ‘contains knowledge of the threat of its own possible destruction’,144 since Kubla is aware of ‘Ancestral voices prophesying war’. Despite his attempt to establish a paradise in which there will be an everlasting present full of pleasure, the

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past intrudes — something mysteriously prior to the mighty builder — predicting that the future holds unrest in store. Kubla’s creation is grand, but grandeur is not exempt from time. The fragility that coexists with grandeur is underlined in the six-line interlude at the centre of the poem, beginning: ‘The shadow of the dome of pleasure | Floated midway on the waves’.145 Despite the opinion of many critics that ‘Kubla Khan’ presents a precisely delineated topography, these lines are puzzling: where are the waves? Rivers do not usually have waves, so the location might be the ‘lifeless ocean’, in which case ‘midway’ suggests quite far out to sea; though the sea is at least five miles away, and probably much further, since the river also has to f low through caverns ‘measureless to man’ before reaching it. Over this distance, not only can Kubla hear the ‘tumult’ of river sinking into ocean, but can also (it is implied) see the shadow of his dome on the sea. The effect of this emphasis on distance is to suggest the vast scale of Kubla’s work. Yet the surrounding natural chaos is by implication vaster still, and that word ‘shadow’ hints strongly at the ephemeral nature of the dome: it perhaps gestures to the Republic’s notion that art is at two removes from reality, and to the Myth of the Cave.146 (The word ‘device’ further stresses the artifice of Kubla’s creation.) The impression is like that of the line in Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, ‘Look on my works ye Mighty and despair’: what had been the triumphant words of a creative tyrant change their meaning into a self-mockery millennia later, once the ‘lone and level waste’ — like the chaos surrounding Kubla’s dome — has reconquered. Elsewhere, Coleridge too used this image for the transience of attempts to impose artifice upon nature: ‘the mighty columns were but sand, | And lazy snakes trail o’er the level ruins!’147 If ‘it would be wrong’ (as Beer says) ‘to see Kubla as representing the [serenely triumphant] highest type of genius’,148 then, yet the power of his will has something of the divine Fiat about it, is he not similar to Plato’s Demiurge as Coleridge imagined him, subduing the ὑλή with partial success? Support for this speculation can be found in Coleridge’s above-quoted question, ‘The Poet & his Subject, are they not as the Δημιουργος & υλή of Plato?’ For the concluding eighteen lines of ‘Kubla Khan’ show the poet trying to be ‘as’ the creator of the dome (which among many possible symbolisms could suggest the pendent world, exactly what the Demiurge creates).149 The play of tenses in this stanza again underlines the ephemerality of the present moment. To paraphrase the content: once upon a time the poet heard an Abyssinian maid sing about paradise,150 and if in the future he could fully recollect the song, then he would be filled with inspiration, provoking admiration and astonishment in his audience. Inspiration is f leeting, and its value dependent on a willed recollection — ‘Could I revive within me [. . .]’. But whereas with the Demiurge-Kubla to will was to create (Kubla can), the poet is stuck in the conditional tense (could), diffident in spite of his proclaimed ambition.151 Before pursuing this thought I want to add some observations to the large body of critical comment about the Platonic inspiration evoked in the closing lines. John Beer has uncovered numerous literary echoes in the poem,152 a few of which are from Akenside, whose Pleasures of Imagination was a major source for Coleridge’s

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1795 lectures. I propose one further echo. Akenside invokes the ‘Genius of Ancient Greece’ and in particular a wild-minded, inspired Plato consonant with Coleridge’s early portrayal of him: Could but my happy hand intwine a wreath Of Plato’s olive with the Mantuan bay, [. . .] Then should my powerful voice at once dispell Those monkish horrors; should in words divine Relate how favour’d minds like you inspir’d [. . .]153

The movement of the verse in describing conditional inspiration (‘could [. . .] should’) is very similar to that of Coleridge’s ‘Could [. . .] ’twould’: both poets hark back to a temporally distant Platonic inspiration which may or may not be still recoverable. As for the predicted awe of the onlookers admiring the poet who ‘on honeydew hath fed, | And drank the milk of Paradise’, Socrates’ central speech from the Ion has been routinely cited as a source ever since Elisabeth Schneider declared it ‘obvious’:154 For the priests of Cybele perform not their dances, while they have the free use of their intellect; so these melody poets pen those beautiful songs of theirs only when they are out of their sober minds. But as soon as they proceed to give voice and motion to those songs, adding to their words the harmony of music and the measure of dance, they are immediately transported; and, possessed by some divine power, are like the priestesses of Bacchus, who, full of the god, no longer draw water, but honey and milk out of the springs and fountains; though unable to do any thing like it when they are sober.155

This does correspond persuasively to ‘Kubla Khan’: the earth-goddess ‘Cybele’ in particular, whose rites were frenzied, is thought to be one of the mytho­logical figures animating the name Kubla (‘Cubla’ in the Crewe Manuscript).156 However, Euripides’ Bacchae itself should not be discounted from the matrix of back­g round texts, especially since Coleridge repeatedly borrowed Euripides from his college library as an undergraduate. Sydenham notes two correspondences between the above passage from the Ion and the Bacchae, the first of which he translates as follows: Some, longing for the milder milky draught, Green herbs or bladed grass of the blest ground Cropp’d with light finger; and to them, behold, Out gush’d the milky liquid: trickling down To others, from their ivy-twined wands Dropp’d the sweet honey . . .157

And milk and honey reverberate through countless texts, ever since the Song of Songs. Pindar, another early favourite of Coleridge’s, uses milk and honey as a metaphor for poetry, thus like Socrates yoking two usually differentiated types of experience, Bacchic ecstasy and poetic inspiration.158 So the passage from Ion is merely the most convenient representative of a large matrix of these images.

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Finally, George Watson has suggested that Coleridge’s phrase ‘holy dread’ is Platonic, citing Laws 671d (Θεῖον Φόβον) and adding: ‘That “Kubla Khan” is in some sense a comment on Plato’s theory of poetry is not really in doubt’.159 Although that might sound too precise a source for a phrase as slight as ‘holy dread’, the context in Laws is pertinent, since the Athenian Stranger is discussing how to govern the music of drinking assemblies, especially the tumultuous rites of Bacchus.160 By way of prologue he insists that poets must be compelled to assert that the good (temperate and just) man is happy,161 and further that the poet must use melodies and words together, with properly judged rhythm (Coleridge’s ‘mingled measure’?). For the habit of ‘arranging naked words in measure’ is said to be pernicious, as is ‘producing melody and rhythm without words’, since this is too irrational — ‘it is very difficult to know the intention of the rhythm and harmony which subsist without words’. Also unacceptable is the mingling of the harp, the human voice, and animal noises, as this excites irrational laughter. The Muses themselves would never commit these offences, but imitative poets ‘are more depraved than the Muses’.162 Good poets, however, would judge harmony and rhythm properly to promote moral discipline. As for the worshippers of Bacchus, the Athenian Stranger points out that because they are drunk, they are easily led: and the best leader is a legislator who is sober, disciplining the unruliness of those who have partaken too freely of the milk of paradise, with ‘the most beautiful opposing fear, in conjunction with justice; which divine fear we have denominated shame and modesty’.163 (The parallel with the charioteer, spirited horse and bad horse in Phaedrus is evident.) So the Platonic ‘holy dread’ seems related to that of the imagined audience of ‘Kubla Khan’; Plato and Coleridge again coincide in their anxious concern with audience response. I wish to modify Watson’s claim that ‘Kubla Khan’ is a comment on Plato’s theory (or theories) of poetry to suggest, rather, that it runs parallel to it. Returning to the tentativeness of the conditional tense (‘Could I revive within me . . .’), it is possible to see a parallel with Socrates’ delivery of his second inspired speech in another persona, and Plato’s bathetic ploy of analysing the principles of rhetoric immediately afterwards, thus drawing attention to the process of remembering and recomposition. The poet of ‘Kubla Khan’, as I have suggested, is ref lecting on what it was like to have been inspired and what it would be like in the future; in the moment of inspiration itself, such knowledge would be impossible. In Harding’s words: The seer of “Kubla Khan” lost his power to revive within him the maid’s symphony and song at the very instant when he recognized the maid as distinct from himself, when he became, that is, conscious of her. The truly possessed or inspired conjurer of a daemon has no notion, while he is in his trance, that the daemon is not himself.164

It is not the vision that fails the bard, but the other way round: these lines are not spoken in the character of the possessed bard, but, more subtly, in that of the bard who knows what it is to be possessed and knows, too, that this inspired state has now left him, that the poem is written out of the memory of the inspired state rather than out of the inspired state itself.165

Harding’s further comment that there is a ‘startling honesty’ about this, in that the poet is not permitted to know ‘whether his words are of divine or daemonic

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origin’, seems to me exactly right: no sooner has the poet raised the possibility of imitating the Kubla-Demiurge’s creativity through inspiration, than he submits this hope to critical scrutiny and is forced to grasp at a recollection which might never fully return. The line ‘I would build that dome in air’ always reminds commentators of Amphion, the inspired singer and orphan who built the walls of Thebes through his music alone. This allusion neatly links with the passage of Cudworth on plastic nature which I cited above. Cudworth writes: If the oecodomical166 art, which is in the mind of the architect, were supposed to be transfused into the stones, bricks and mortar, there acting upon them in such a manner as to make them come together of themselves, and range themselves into the form of a complete edifice, as Amphion was said, by his harp, to have made the stones move, and place themselves orderly of their own accord, and so to have built the walls of Thebes; or if the musical art were conceived to be immediately in the instruments and strings, animating them as a living soul, and making them to move exactly, according to the laws of harmony, without any external impulse: these, and such like instances, in Aristotle’s judgment, would be fit iconisms or representations of the plastick nature, that being art itself acting immediately upon the matter as an inward principle in it.167

The poet in the concluding lines on ‘Kubla Khan’, however, is discovering that unlike plastic nature, Amphion or Kubla, his own mind is obliged to the difficult effort of willed recollection. I have called the poet’s doubt-filled conditional tense a ‘critical scrutiny’ of his inspiration. Coleridge’s need to submit irrational inspiration to philosophical analysis, hinted at in the poem, is confirmed and developed in the Preface published with the poem in 1816. The Preface, in fact, repeats the ref lective movement of the concluding stanza in a different idiom.168 The poem is now announced as a ‘psychological curiosity’ as opposed to having any ‘poetic merits’; just as Coleridge explained his early interest in Platonism as merely a desire to investigate ‘Facts of mind’.169 Suspicious of the irrationality and f leetingness of inspiration, Coleridge demotes ‘Kubla Khan’ to ‘A Vision in a Dream’, now claiming that it was composed ‘in a profound sleep’, as opposed to the ‘sort of Reverie’ described by the Crewe Manuscript. (This gesture of modesty also seems a symptom of the anxiety of reception: the concern with audience response expressed in the closing lines of the poems is compounded in the act of publication.) The Preface emphasizes the irrationality of the composition: both the images and words ‘rose up’, very different from Kubla’s effortless but willed creation, but exactly like the passive hearing of the maid’s song in the ‘vision’. And like the concluding section of the poem, the Preface proclaims the need to recollect (the word ‘recollection(s)’ occurs three times). Only recollection can substantiate the fragile, irrational vision. This activity of the philosopher, however, is all too easily disrupted by worldly intrusions, symbolized by the person from Porlock. Even recollection which was ‘distinct’ deteriorates to the ‘vague and dim’ in this way, just as for the child in the ‘Immortality Ode’ whom life drags ever further from the vision of the Ideas in the state of pre-existence. ‘Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind’, avers the Preface, ‘the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were,

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given to him’. So like the conditionally inspired poet of the concluding lines, the author of the Preface is required to exercise the conscious will to recover and thus give value to his ‘given’ vision. Yet unfortunately it is not easy for the poet to be as the Demiurge-Kubla: the human poet’s ‘purpose’ can be frustrated. The tomorrow when he will sing ‘loud and long’ and be acclaimed as truly inspired is ‘yet to come’; the unifying of irrational creativity with rational ref lection — of poetry with philosophy — is perpetually striven for but never secured. The painful struggle of the poet to create, whether figured as a process of taming the chaos, or as anamnesis, remembering an inspired vision, is clearly associated in Coleridge’s mind with Plato — not only with Plato’s Demiurge, but with the philosopher himself. For Plato’s poetic genius imported in him those deep impressions and a love of them which, mocking all comparison with after objects, leaves behind it thirst for something not attained, to which nothing in life is found commensurate and which still impels the soul to pursue.170

That, however, brings us to Coleridge’s direct interpretation of Plato. Notes to Chapter 3 1. Two words are used for ‘quarrel’, διαφορά (607b) and ἐναντιώσεως (607c), both connoting hostility. 2. On the ‘noble lie’, see Republic 414b–415d. On the recent origin of the quarrel, see Plato on Poetry, ed. Penelope Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 18 — henceforth: Murray. (I take all Greek quotations of Ion and Republic from Murray.) Thomas Szlezák notes a precedent in Xenophanes’ (sixth-fifth century bc) criticism of Homer: Der Staat (Düsseldorf and Zurich: Artemis und Winkler, 2000), p. 994. 3. For a selective bibliography see Thomas Gould, The Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philo­ sophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 219–20. Those who play down the banishment tend to see elaborate irony in the Republic as a whole, proposing e.g. that the obvious inhumanity of this and other measures is a signal for us to understand that although ‘Man cannot live without ideals, equally man cannot live by ideals alone’ ( John Herman Randall Jr., Plato: Dramatist of the Life of Reason (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 149). Cf. Gadamer’s argument that the Republic aims to stimulate moral reform in the individual by providing a picture of the impossible: a state-organized paideia with total censorship guaranteeing harmony among the citizens (‘Plato and the Poets’, in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. by P. Christopher Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 39–72, esp. pp. 51–54). Such interpretations, however, must resort to yet further elaboration to explain Socrates’ emphasis on the possible reality of his ideal state (Republic 473c). Among Coleridge’s contemporaries, the most noteworthy discussion of the banishment occurs in Schopenhauer’s 1819 work Die Welt als Wille und Representation [The World as Will and Representation], but since Coleridge did not know this it would take me too far afield. 4. Phil. Lects. i, 161. 5. Republic 607d–e. 6. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols (London: Ernest Benn, 1926–30), vii, 20, 140. Shelley, though, claimed Plato as a poet. 7. BL ii, 14. 8. BL ii, 25–26; 156. 9. Lects. 1795, pp. 196–97, discussed in Chapter 1, above. 10. ‘Dejection: An Ode’, line 89. Cf. ‘Davy calls me the Poet-philosopher — I hope, Philosophy & Poetry will not neutralize each other, & leave me an inert mass’ (CL ii, 668–69). 11. BL i, 300. 12. I am putting in cruder terms what Tim Milnes aptly calls the Biographia’s ‘hesitation between

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philosophical dialectic and philosophical aesthetic’: ‘Eclipsing Art: Method and Metaphysics in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60.1 ( January 1999), 125–47 (p. 127). 13. See especially Kathleen M. Wheeler, Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 14. Unsigned review, British Critic, 8 (November 1817), 460–81; reprinted in Jackson, ed., Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, pp. 355–75 (p. 375). 15. Stephen, Hours in a Library, 3 vols (London: Folio Society, 1991; first published 1874–79), iii, 332. On the troubled genesis of the work, see BL i, li–lxvii. 16. Esp. pp. 263–64. Hunt mentions that a friend had recently shown him a copy of BL, which he had not seen for twenty-two years (p. 4): a ref lection of the book’s lack of circulation? 17. BL ii, 19. 18. Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 10. 19. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933, 1964), p. 80. 20. I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, ed. by John Constable (London: Routledge, 2001; first published 1934), p. 11. 21. Coleridge on Imagination, p. 21. 22. ‘Aspects of Coleridge’s Distinction between Reason and Understanding’, p. 167. 23. BL i, 142; cf. CM iv, 112; CM v, 469; SWF i, 755. 24. Republic 475e. 25. Republic 480a. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 282 — henceforth: Havelock. 26. For these definitions I draw on Julias A. Elias, Plato’s Defence of Poetry (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), p. 2. 27. Republic 606e. 28. As Havelock argues. Giovanni Reale has recently endorsed this argument but criticized Havelock for ignoring Plato’s declarations of the inferiority of the written to the spoken word in Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter. Reale importantly distinguishes three types of orality: (i) poetic-mimetic; (ii) dialectic; (iii) rhetoric: Platone: Alla ricerca della sapienza segreta (Milan: Rizzoli, 1998), pp. 26, 35–72. 29. Protagoras 325e5–326a3, trans. from J. M. Cooper, in Plato, Complete Works. 30. Republic 365a–b. Cf. Christopher Janaway, ‘Plato and the Arts’, in A Companion to Plato, ed. by Hugh H. Benson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 388–400 (pp. 389–90). 31. CN iii, 4397 f.49 (March 1818). 32. 424d–e. Cf. Laws 700d. 33. CN iii, 4337. 34. CL iv, 762 (28 July 1817). 35. CN iii, 4337 (and n.), an entry of January–April 1817 apparently made with the revised Friend in mind. That Coleridge in this entry quotes in Greek and cites passages of the Laws in addition to the Republic is good evidence of his having studied Plato extensively in Greek. 36. Republic 377e. 37. LL ii, 502; cf. LL i, 325–26. 38. LL ii, 503. 39. CN i, 470. 40. 381d. The verb is καταψεύδομαι, i.e. to feign, invent; tell lies against. Greek uses the same word (ψεῦδος) for ‘fiction’ and ‘lie’. 41. ‘The use of the words ἰδέαις (d2), εἶδος (d3), ἰδέας (d6 and e1) to describe the god’s shape or form underlines the link between this passage [Republic 380d] and the later development of the theory of Forms at 476–480 and 523–525’ (Murray, p. 147). Cf. 395a–b on the need to imitate one thing only. 42. BL ii, 27–28; cf. CN ii, 2274. 43. Republic 605b. 44. Of English writers (BL ii, 210–12). 45. BL ii, 229. 46. 392a.

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47. 395d. 48. Friend, i, 20. 49. 394e. 50. 394e–395b. 51. CM ii, 692–93. 52. Republic 401c–d. 53. Many commentators see discontinuity between books 2–3 and book 10, especially since in the latter Socrates admits only ‘hymns to the gods and praises of good people’ (607a), a radical restriction compared with the earlier books. I follow Susan B. Levin, however, in treating book 10 as a continuation. Levin notes that books 2–3 focus on children (for whom a range of poetry may have a pedagogic role), book 10 on adults (who in public events may use only praise-poems): The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 152–66. Cf. Murray, p. 185. 54. 435c–441c; 595a–b. 55. An interpretative crux, since nowhere else does Plato suggest that God makes the Ideas, nor that there is an Idea of every mundane object. (Cf. Parmenides 130b–e, where Socrates queries whether to posit Ideas of hair, dirt, mud, etc.) For a critical summary and the clever suggestion that Socrates is here ironically parodying the imitative poets who ascribe unworthy activities such as bed-making (and by implication sleeping and sex) to the gods, see Charles Griswold, ‘The Ideas and the Criticism of Poetry in Plato’s Republic, Book X’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 19 (1981), 135–50. Republic 598b helped give rise to the Neoplatonic notion that the Ideas exist in the divine mind: see further p. 123 n. 149 below. 56. CN iii, 4397 f.49; cf. CN iii, 3592. 57. BL ii, 42. 58. BL ii, 43, 45. 59. See Frederick Burwick, Illusion and the Drama: Critical Theory of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 209–29. 60. Cratylus 432b–d. 61. Verdenius, Mimesis: Plato’s Doctrine of Artistic Imitation and its Meaning to Us (Leiden: Brill, 1949), pp. 16–17. 62. Republic 597e–598a, trans. by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), p. 1202. 63. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 42–46; Murray, pp. 198–99. 64. 28a–29d. See F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato translated with a running commentary (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1937), pp. 33–39, 165 — henceforth: Cornford. In Sophist Plato explicitly compares the divine with the human craftsman (265e–266d). 65. Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, p. 430. 66. Ennead 5.8.1, trans. by A. H. Armstrong, 7 vols (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Heinemann, 1967–84), v, 237–41 (p. 239). 67. Timaeus 37c; Cornford, p. 99. 68. Ennead 5.8.1. 69. Existentialists and Mystics, p. 392. 70. Existentialists and Mystics, p. 388; cf. p. 15: ‘I cannot accept these “Ideas”, even as offering a metaphor of how the artist works’. 71. CN iii, 3952. The word ‘hinder’ (?) ‘is practically an indecipherable scribble’ (Perry, Notebooks, p. 244). 72. 49a; Cornford, p. 181; Michael J. B. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 32. 73. More, A Platonick Song of the Soul, ed. by Alexander Jacob (London: Associated University Presses, 1998), p. 617; cf. p. 558. 74. e.g. CN v, 5813 f.35. 75. 48a; Cornford, p. 176. 76. The exactly contemporaneous work by Joseph Harpur, An Essay on the Principles of Philosophical Criticism, applied to Poetry (London, 1810), likewise sees in poetry a necessary opposition between

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υλή and εἶδος (pp. 24–26). Although Harpur stresses the Aristotelian εἶδος against the Platonic ἰδεα, his quotation of Ammonius and Porphyry ref lects the Neoplatonic tendency to harmonize Platonic with Aristotelian doctrine. 77. Timaeus 29e, 41b; BL i, 31. 78. Italics mine. I am indebted to Perry’s note (Notebooks, p. 244). 79. CN ii, 2355. 80. CM iv, 161–62. 81. E.g. SWF i, 794–95. Anthony Harding describes how Coleridge in his Highgate years rewrote Naturphilosophie in a Trinitarian frame: ‘Coleridge, the Afterlife, and the Meaning of Hades’, Studies in Philology, 96 (Spring 1999), 204–23. 82. F. W. J. Schelling: Texte zur Philosophie der Kunst, ed. Werner Beierwaltes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), p. 74; discussed pp. 9–10, 39–40 (n. 22). (henceforth: Schelling). 83. Michael Bullock translates this lecture as ‘Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature’: appendix to Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry (London: Faber, 1968), pp. 321–64. 84. Schelling, pp. 56–57, 65. 85. Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (1803), lecture 14, in Schelling, p. 127. 86. Schelling, p. 58. 87. ‘[Der Künstler] muß sich also vom Produkt oder vom Geschöpf entfernen, aber nur um sich zu der schaffenden Kraft zu erheben und diese geistig zu ergreifen’ (Schelling, p. 64). 88. CN iii, 4397, f.50. Foakes (LL ii, 217–25) takes his text for the lecture from this Notebook entry. 89. ‘Die Wissenschaft, durch welche die Natur wirkt, ist freilich keine der menschlichen gleiche, die mit der Ref lexion ihrer selbst verknüpft wäre’ (Schelling, p. 62). Affinities between Schelling and Cudworth are to be expected given Schelling’s own study of the latter: see Douglas Hedley, ‘Cudworth, Coleridge and Schelling’, Coleridge Bulletin, 16 (Winter 2000), 63–70. 90. Cudworth, i, 156, 172. 91. Frederick Burwick, Mimesis and its Romantic Reflections (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001), pp. 105–06. See pp. 89–106 for a detailed comparison of Coleridge’s essay with that of Schelling. 92. CN iii, 4397 f. 53, italics Coleridge’s; Schelling, p. 66. Burwick notes this example (Mimesis, p. 106). 93. Frederick Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996), pp. 36–77; Ina Lipkowitz, ‘Inspiration and the Poetic Imagination: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, Studies in Romanticism, 30 (1991), 605–31; Elinor Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 62–95. 94. Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) likewise begins from Ion (pp. 40–60), but has only minimal discussion of Coleridge. 95. Murray, p. 8. 96. Ion 533d. 97. Ion 534b. 98. Ion 535e. 99. Ion 542a–b. 100. Goethe, ‘Plato als Mitgenosse einer christlichen Offenbarung: im Jahre 1796 durch eine Uebersetzung veranlaßt’, reprinted in Ion, ed. by Helmut Flashar (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988), p. 51. 101. 535a; TTS xiii, 450. 102. Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 31. 103. 534e; Murray, p. 121. 104. 245a; 248e. 105. W. J. Verdenius, ‘Der Begriff der Mania in Platons Phaidros’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 44 (1962), 132–50 (p. 134). 106. Verdenius, ‘Der Begriff der Mania’, p. 136.

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107. Phaedrus 265a. 108. CN ii, 3216. Coburn notes that Coleridge is adapting Chapman’s ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ to Homer. 109. 682a, trans. by Trevor T. Saunders, in Plato, Complete Works, pp. 1370–71. 110. Laws 719c. 111. 241e. 112. BL i, 114. 113. See E. N. Tigerstedt, Plato’s Idea of Poetical Inspiration (Helsinki: n. pub., 1969), p. 52 — hence­ forth: Tigerstedt, Inspiration. 114. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, pp. 42–43, 62–63. 115. See Verdenius, ‘Der Begriff der Mania in Platons Phaidros’, p. 149. 116. Quoted in Tigerstedt, Inspiration, p. 51. 117. 263d. 118. 265b. 119. Tigerstedt, Inspiration, p. 57. 120. Paul Plass, ‘Philosophic Anonymity and Irony in the Platonic Dialogues’, American Journal of Philology, 85 (1964), 254–78, p. 271, quoted in Tigerstedt, Inspiration, p. 58. This view has also been taken more recently by Elias, Plato’s Defence of Poetry, p. 32. 121. Cf. P. Woodruff, ‘What Could Go Wrong with Inspiration? Why Plato’s Poets Fail’, in Plato on Beauty, Wisdom and the Arts (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1982), pp. 137–50. 122. Tigerstedt, Inspiration, p. 58. 123. Tigerstedt, Inspiration, p. 55. 124. Timaeus 71e–72b. 125. CL ii, 714 (to Godwin, 25 March 1801). 126. BL ii, 156. 127. BL i, 232 (Hierocles was an expositor of Pythagoras), 251. 128. Burwick, Poetic Madness, p. 38. 129. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1, 7–8. Although these lines were ‘cardinal’ for the long eighteenth century ( Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 11), I have encountered only one — anecdotal — reference to them in Coleridge’s criticism (Friend, i, 471; no record of his lecture on the play has survived, LL i, 372). If an argument may be drawn from an absence, this may ref lect Coleridge’s resistance to presentations of Shakespeare as an irrational warbler of native wood-notes wild, and implicitly to Wordsworth’s use of the lines to characterize Imagination in his 1815 ‘Preface to Poems’. Nevertheless, images of inspiration abound in Coleridge’s early poems, and Dorothy Wordsworth saw in Coleridge ‘more of “the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling” than I ever witnessed’ (Coleridge: Interviews, p. 45). 130. BL ii, 26–27. 131. LL i, 80 (italics Coleridge’s). 132. SWF ii, 1166. 133. Harding, Coleridge and the Inspired Word (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), p. 18. 134. Ibid. 135. CM i, 560; The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Theosopher. To which is prefixed, the life of the author. With figures, illustrating his principles, left by the Reverend William Law, M. A., 4 vols, ed. by G. Ward and T. Langcake, trans. by John Sparrow (London, 1764, 1772, 1781), i, p. xv. Coleridge’s copy was a gift from De Quincey. Böhme’s letter is to Caspar Lindern, usually known as letter 12. 136. CN iii, 4287, but following Perry’s reading ‘Aye?’ (Perry, Notebooks, p. 127) instead of Coburn’s ‘Aye!’. 137. See Laura M. White, ‘The Person from Porlock in “Kubla Khan” and Later Texts: Inspiration, Agency, and Interruption’, Connotations 16.1–3 (2006–07), 172–93. 138. Bate, Coleridge, p. 78. 139. Perry, Division, p. 201, citing George Watson, Coleridge the Poet (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 128.

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140. Lines 49–50, in Browning, Poetical Works 1833–1864, ed. by Ian Jack (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 810. 141. This pronunciation rhymes ‘Khan’ with ‘ran’ in line three. For evidence see Robert F. Fleissner, Sources, Meaning and Influence of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ (New York: Mellen, 2000), p. 6. Coleridge’s Devonshire accent would have made it a long sound (‘Caan’). 142. BL i, 304. 143. Perry, Division, p. 202; cf. John Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), pp. 232–33. 144. Humphry House, Coleridge (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1967), p. 121. 145. Lines 31–32. 146. Coleridge alludes to this myth in ‘The Destiny of Nations’, lines 20–26. 147. ‘The Night-Scene: A Dramatic Fragment’, lines 82–83. 148. Beer, Coleridge the Visionary, 226. 149. The spherical shape of the heavens and each planet is described in Timaeus 40a, 58a. 150. Mount Abora is ‘Mount Amara’ in the Crewe Manuscript, the latter being Milton’s false paradise, Paradise Lost IV 281–82. 151. It is sometimes claimed (e.g. by House, pp. 115–16) that interpretation depends on whether ‘Could’ or ‘I’ is stressed; but it seems to me metrically possible to stress either or both words. If so, the stress would ref lect rather than determine a reader’s interpretation of the lines. 152. Beer, ‘The Languages of “Kubla Khan” ’, in Coleridge’s Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver, ed. by Richard Gravil and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 220–62. On Akenside, see pp. 227–29. 153. The Poems of Mark Akenside (London: J. Dodsley, 1772), Book i, lines 475–81 (pp. 146–47). 154. Elizabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium, and ‘Kubla Khan’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 245. 155. Ion 534a–b (italics added). 156. Richard Gerber, ‘Keys to “Kubla Khan” ’, English Studies, 44 (1963), 321–41; Murray, p. 115. 157. TTS XIII, 449, translating Bacchae, v, 707. 158. Noted by Murray along with further such references (p. 116). 159. Watson, p. 123. 160. For Coleridge on Bacchus, see CN iii, 3263 and n. 161. Laws 660e. 162. 669a–670a. 163. 671c–d. 164. Harding, Coleridge and the Inspired Word, p. 56. 165. Harding, Coleridge and the Inspired Word, pp. 56–57. 166. OED gives no other instance of this word. 167. Cudworth, i, 155. 168. Cf. David Perkins, ‘The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan: On Coleridge’s Introductory Note’, in Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam’s Dream, ed. by J. Robert Barth, SJ, and John L. Mahoney (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), pp. 97–108 (p. 99); and Wheeler’s thorough analysis of the interactions between Preface and ‘epilogue’ in The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry, pp. 24–30. 169. CL i, 260, discussed in Chapter 1. 170. Phil. Lects. i, 183.

Chapter 4

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Plato in Coleridge’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy Exoteric Lectures, Esoteric Marginalia Coleridge’s most sustained commentary on Plato appears in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, delivered in 1819. Kathleen Coburn’s announcement of her discovery of the Frere Manuscript of these lectures in 1934 provoked temporary excitement,1 but the lectures tended to disappoint their twentieth-century readers, and critics have rarely considered them in much detail. Lecturing, it is usually and reasonably assumed, was for Coleridge always a financial necessity rather than a passion, which might imply a lack of sharpness in the lecture notes. W. J. Bate even found the main interest of these lectures to lie in an absence: that Coleridge showed himself ‘suddenly [. . .] reticent’ on the German dynamic and organic philosophy that had been for twenty years so congenial. Bate concluded that a kind of strong internal censorship forced Coleridge away from consideration of Schelling (about whom he says little more than that he would be ‘puzzled to give [. . .] a true account’), towards the presumably less sensitive territory of ancient and medieval philosophy.2 More harshly but along comparable lines, Fruman dismissed the philosophical Lectures as merely a patchwork of plagiarism from their principal source, W. G. Tennemann’s Geschichte der Philosophie.3 The introduction and notes in J. R. de J. Jackson’s recent edition, however, encourage a reassessment. It would be reductive to explain the form and subject matter of the lectures exclusively with reference to those personal neuroses of Coleridge noted by Bate and Fruman. A more interesting explanation can be gleaned by considering, firstly Coleridge’s circumspect attitude to the audience of these lectures, and secondly his extensive and critical marginalia to Tennemann (and to a lesser extent Stanley). Coleridge could certainly expect an audience prejudiced against German philosophy and unwilling to hear extensive interpretations of Kant and Schelling.4 Moreover, could he select his auditors, Coleridge announced in his Prospectus, he might choose that the majority be new to the study of the history of philosophy. His hope for and expectation of an audience whose minds were close to tabula rasa was realistic, given that apart from encyclopaedia articles, which tend by their very nature to be discontinuous, histories of philosophy in English were restricted (as Coleridge mentions) to two rather limited works, Stanley’s History of Philosophy and

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Enfield’s abridged translation of Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae.5 Stanley is an unmethodical anthology of ancient philosophy, whilst Enfield’s Brucker, with its rejection of any philosophical thought other than the clear and the distinct, is above all a monument to the Enlightenment.6 Another relevant and popular item of reading would have been Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, but the scepticism of this work was antithetical to Coleridge’s approach: Coleridge attacks Gibbon, albeit with a cautious respect ref lective of his audience’s possible taste, especially in Lecture Seven (on philosophy and Christianity in the Roman Empire).7 So the decision to focus on ancient philosophy as both itself unjustly neglected and as the necessary background to contemporary philosophy appears reasonable with respect to the likely knowledge and interests of the audience. Lack of control over his audience always caused Coleridge anxiety, and there is indeed good evidence that he lectured out of necessity rather than passion. Beginning his notes to the last lecture (fourteen) he exclaims, ‘O pray Heaven, that it may indeed be the Last’.8 The second half of the course is, in Owen Barfield’s words, ‘less satisfactory than the first, less vigorous, less consequential, less pulledtogether’, mainly because Coleridge was finding the lectures burdensome and ‘getting thoroughly tired of them’.9 Yet the earlier lectures on ancient philosophy are entirely vigorous and consequential, as I discuss below. Coleridge even struck an anonymous reporter dumb with his sublime description of Christ’s philosophical intervention: ‘Mr — C — expatiated at length on this happy period — I note it as only a remembrance for I cannot follow him in his clear & beautiful exposition of this glorious event — ’.10 Coleridge’s real engagement with his subjects, at least in the first seven lectures, would not be doubted unless one were expecting something else — namely an interpretation of modern German thought. Bate is right to detect reticence in Coleridge’s presentation, but this might have less to do with unconscious censorship than with a conscious separation of material which is suitable for a general audience — the exoteric — from material which is to be disclosed only to the few who had the necessary background of knowledge, the esoteric. Coburn discerned in Coleridge’s abbreviated discussion of the Germans ‘something being withheld, and not gracefully, from a public audience’.11 The notion of the esoteric, graceful or not, is important to Coleridge’s presentation of several philosophers, and it is hard to see how he could have raised this notion without having his own practice frequently in mind. He attributes esoteric doctrines not only to Pythagoras but also to Plato, discusses the esoteric aspect of the ancient Mystery religions, and even speaks about the esoteric teaching of Cornelius Agrippa.12 Coleridge does not approve esoteric teachings unreservedly: Christianity, he mentions, dispenses with them, yet still takes account of the circumstance in which they originate, namely the different capacities of different people: Christianity did not propose to destroy these diversities and different degrees in the Heads and Hearts of Men, from which the distinction of Exoteric and Esoteric arose & in which their apology must rest; but it did not encourage it as a desirable thing by ordaining it, but on the contrary worked as its counter-agent. The whole Gospel was preached, whether the seeds should fall on the Rock, the Sands, or the arable field.13

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However, the openness and wholeness possible for true religion, in Coleridge’s view, cannot be matched by philosophy, which ought to complement religion but is not identical with it. For Coleridge, the esoteric–exoteric distinction is basic to many philosophers — even, as we saw in Chapter 2, Kant. Coleridge has the fifth recorded use of the word ‘esoteric’ in the OED, referring in Biographia to his former opinion of the Trinity as ‘an esoteric doctrine of natural religion’ (the italics perhaps registering self-consciousness about the use of this word).14 The first recorded use is from Stanley, in a section Coleridge annotated: ‘The Auditors of Pythagoras [. . .] were of two sorts, Exoterick and Esoterick; the Exotericks were those who were under probation, which if they well performed, they were admitted to be Esotericks’.15 For the philosophical Lectures themselves this distinction is at least an apt metaphor. Corresponding to the Lectures is a private or esoteric discussion, to be found in the marginalia to Tennemann. These marginalia are not personal scribblings but rather meditations intended for the volumes’ owner, J. H. Green, whom Coleridge addresses personally.16 (Around the time when Coleridge was annotating these volumes, Lamb published his essay ‘The Two Races of Men’ (1820) — the title glancing satirically at Coleridge’s distinction between the two classes of men, Platonists and Aristotelians — which casts himself as a lender and ‘S. T. C’. as a borrower, with the advice: ‘lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C. — he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value’.17) These marginalia show that Coleridge’s relationship to Tennemann was not, as Fruman assumed, slavish: most of the annotations record strong objections. Further, Coleridge understood that Tennemann’s readings of ancient philosophers were conditioned by his — in Coleridge’s persuasive view — overly literal-minded ‘Kantéanism’, and conversely that he used readings of ancient philosophers in the service of contemporary polemic. Annotating Tennemann’s sixth volume, for instance, Coleridge argues: From the date of the volume [1807] it is evident, that Tennemann had two objects in view, first, to shew the identity of the Neo-platonic System, especially as exhibited by Plotinus and Proclus, with the Natur-philosophie of Schelling and his School — 2nd. to confute the latter under the name of the former.18 Again, ‘This is no longer a History of Philosophy; but a polemic Tract against Neo-kantian Anti-kantians, Fichte under the name of Plotinus and Schelling of Proclus’.19 Both esoterica and anticipations abound in the marginalia to Tennemann. Of the ‘profundity and comprehension of the Heraclitic Philosophy’ Coleridge writes, ‘Whatever is excellent in the Natur-philosophie of Schelling and his Disciples and Off-sets is anticipated therein, without the aberrations of the German School’.20 This indicates Coleridge’s sense of the epochal circularity of philosophical history, and is evidence that while Coleridge talked of the ancients, he was thinking at the same time of the moderns. This chapter proceeds in five further sections. First, I probe the circular view of philosophical history just outlined. Second, coming to the heart of the lectures, I discuss Coleridge’s presentation of Plato as a poet; and third, the apparently quite contrasting strand of his Plato interpretation — as teacher of an esoteric system.

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Part four moves to Coleridge’s own ‘esoteric’ marginalia to Tennemann, which take these interests to a deeper level, especially with regard to the nature of Ideas. Fifth, I conclude with a close reading of the final section of Lecture Four (on Plato) which suggests that Coleridge sees a certain kind of sublime art as, after all, giving us the best possible access to Plato’s supposedly technical esoteric doctrines: I thus suggest that, for Coleridge, the doctrine of Ideas brings Plato the poet and Plato the esoteric system-builder together after all. Anticipation and Circularity in the History of Philosophy In a notebook, Coleridge recorded the following formula, probably modelled on Plato’s Divided Line: Anticipation : Idea :: Theory : Law; Genius : Anticipation :: Cleverness : Theory21

Likewise in The Friend he writes that Genius adds to the existing stock of power and knowledge ‘by discoveries not accidental but anticipated or resulting from anticipation’.22 The formula ‘Genius : Anticipation’ could sum up Coleridge’s approach to the history of philosophy. ‘Genius’ is integral because despite Coleridge’s disingenuous claim that ‘the Individual is throughout these Lectures subordinated to the History of Philosophy as a striving of the Mind of the World’, in reality he presents a ‘Great Men’ version of history.23 The moral and religious mores of each period are admittedly depicted with bold, clear strokes, but in Coleridge’s scheme whenever a state of materialism or moral emergency takes hold, Providence ensures that a philosopher of genius arises as a kind of saviour: ‘The wise and the virtuous are always few, and it is by few only that the world is progressive’.24 The basic division of Coleridge’s polemic is between materialism and idealism (in a Platonic rather than subjectivist Berkleyan sense). Materialism, maintained by Leucippus, Democritus, and especially Epicurus, and revived by Gassendi, Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac, is founded on the fanciful supposition of the atom as primary constituent of everything including consciousness; it leads inevitably to a denial of moral agency and so to moral depravity, of which the French Revolution would be an exemplary consequence. In opposition to materialism appear various idealists: Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Christ himself, and later Kant. These philosophers teach the primacy of mind rather than matter, and moral self-scrutiny as the foundation of the philosophical life: they fulfil the imperative ‘know thyself ’. In Coleridge’s narrative there emerges a clear providential pattern in the appearance of the idealists. Pythagoras was essentially an educator who demanded moral purification as a preparative to philosophy. Later, amid the confusion and moral corruption of public life enabled by the amoral doctrines of the Sophists, ‘In this emergency Providence vouchsafed to raise up Socrates’.25 Plato, whose character ‘was a combination of Pythagoras with Socrates’,26 also spoke to a chaotic age and was ‘the prophet and preparer for the new world to which his writings and still more his spirit had led’.27 When eventually Epicureanism and its attendant moral debauchery had gained full ascendancy in Rome, opposed by a Stoicism which was little better since it merely hypostatized pride, ‘That bright being [Christ] appeared

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when nothing short of divinity could have saved man from this state, for where else was the assistance to be found?’28 Finally, in the eighteenth century, Voltairean scepticism took hold in Europe: ‘In this wretched state was not only Germany when Kant arose’.29 The idealist geniuses are linked by their providential mission to a fallen and repeatedly falling world, then; but they are also linked by ‘anticipation’. In Lecture Ten Coleridge repeats a musical analogy from The Friend: choosing Cimarosa’s symphonies (rather arbitrarily) as an example, he observes that each present strain seems to recall some previous melody, and at best also to anticipate ‘some prepared and corresponsive future’. The listener to music — or the reader of history — finds his thoughts and feelings to move accordingly: ‘retrospection blends with anticipation, and hope and memory (a female Janus) become one power with a double aspect’.30 The immediate purpose of this analogy is (as in The Friend) to elucidate otherwise paradoxical comparisons between Erasmus and Voltaire, and Luther and Rousseau; but it could stand very well for Coleridge’s procedure throughout. Plato is key to the theme of anticipation at the level of Coleridge’s narrative structure, since Pythagoras anticipated Plato’s Ideas with his system of numbers, and Plato pointed the way to the teaching of Christ:31 the local polytheism of Greece and Rome [. . .] at last was forced to give way to the higher evidence of Christianity, for which I have historical evidence to prove that Platonism at least predisposed the most effective means.32

The implicit notion of anticipation moreover informs Coleridge’s division of philosophy into ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’, with seven lectures on each. Coleridge claims that by the time of Christ (whose ‘philosophy’ is introduced midway through the sixth lecture) ‘the utmost efforts that unaided men could make use of ’ had already been exerted. Christ provided a divine harmony of philosophy with religion, and all subsequent attempts to divorce the two were to be regressions. ( Jackson’s introduction thoroughly explains the symbiotic relationship between philosophy and religion running through the lectures.) Coleridge advertises the second half of his course as elaborating on ‘the effects of those discoveries made by the ancients in speculative philosophy’, and attempting ‘to demonstrate that nothing as [sensible] has really been discovered in pure speculation by the moderns’. He thus hopes to have ‘humbled the pride of a false originality’.33 Amongst the ‘moderns’ Coleridge bestows his warmest praise on Bruno, Böhme, and a Bacon reclaimed from materialism as a descendant of Plato. Locke can claim no originality in having banished scholastic chimeras: he simply misrepresented the scholastic tenets and exploded the straw man of ‘innate ideas’, a procedure which the consciously progressive intellectual world post-1688 was all too prepared to accept. Hume was thoroughly anticipated by the ancient sceptics; there is not a single modern sceptical argument ‘that will not be found anticipated in the work of Sextus Empiricus’.34 Kant, especially his doctrine of practical reason, is claimed for the Christian Platonic side, but he is crammed together with Schelling into the end of the penultimate lecture. Coleridge reserves his greatest enthusiasm for Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Christ, and welcomes the moderns only insofar as they fulfil the anticipations of those philosophers. Since Coleridge’s history of philosophy proceeds by anticipation

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its progression is also circular rather than linear: Epicureanism and Idealism and their respective ethics of self-love and love of one’s neighbour battle continually for ascendancy, while the two credible approaches to philosophy, the Aristotelian and Platonist, also compete cyclically. Consistent with the anticipatory or circular model is Coleridge’s reverence for the originators of idealist views. A glimmer of his past Unitarianism remains evident in his desire to strip away subsequent accretions to the doctrines of both Plato and Christ to reveal the original. He tends therefore to regard later thought as an already anticipated falling-off from original purity. As in the notebook entry of 1810 I analysed in Chapter 1, Coleridge portrays Plato himself as superior in coherence and moral tendency to his followers. Again, Bruno’s claim to philosophical prominence is less in his own right than as ‘the reviver of the Pythagorean system of the universe’.35 Nevertheless Coleridge seldom keeps to a simple pattern, and in tension with the model of circularity and the priority of the original are his assertions of general progress connected especially with natural science, and even with ‘commerce’.36 Moreover the driving principle of Coleridge’s narrative is a beneficent Providence, whose infusion of revelation through the incarnate Logos ought to enable the ‘moderns’ to unite philosophy with true religion to a degree impossible to the ancients with their polytheistic mystery religions. The notions of circularity and progression may be difficult to maintain in tandem, but such a tandem was at the heart of Coleridge’s recent writing on (historical) method for the introduction to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. ‘Without advocating the exploded doctrine of perfectibility’, wrote Coleridge, with only apparent caution, we cannot but regard all that is human in human nature, and all that in nature is above herself, as together working toward that far deeper and more permanent revolution in the moral world, of which the recent changes in the political world may be regarded as the pioneering whirlwind and storm. But woe to that revolution which is not guided by the historic sense; by the pure and unsophisticated knowledge of the past.37

The tension between a circular and linear model for the history of philosophy is certainly not peculiar to Coleridge, however: neither model ‘has ever dominated the European intellectual field without the presence in some form of its rival’.38 Indeed, Coleridge’s historic sense has some affinity with Giambattista Vico’s juxtaposition of the theory of Epochs with that of Providence,39 which might explain Coleridge’s delight when he began to read Vico a few years later. Plato as Poet At the heart of the philosophical Lectures stands Lecture Four on Plato. The portrait of Plato is, however, like Cimarosa’s symphonies Janus-faced, Plato being not only ‘the prophet and preparer for the new world to which his writings and still more his spirit had led’, but also the reconciler of all that went before — his character a union of Pythagoras and Socrates.40 Lecture Four begins with an extensive review of the story so far, to enforce the full significance of Plato, and I will brief ly summarize that review in order to elucidate Coleridge’s complex pattern

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of anticipations. Lecture Two, then, draws up a polarity between the Hebrew and Greek civilizations: in Coleridge’s terms they are opposites in constant tendency to union.41 While the former, guided explicitly by divine inspiration, relied on tradition and enjoyed a ‘whole legislature one with their religion’,42 the latter built a delusive theology through imagination.43 Yet providence guided the Greeks into asking ‘why’; and with the enlightened legislation of Solon arose Thales, who rather than accept traditional beliefs tried to reason from observation of nature to an explanation of it, based on water as the fundamental principle.44 This introductory narrative is designed to prepare for Coleridge’s Christian Platonic presentation of Christ as uniting the highest of Greek and Hebrew wisdom. Linked to this is the more esoteric agenda of detracting from the claims of Egyptian wisdom. Whereas Tennemann follows the Neoplatonists in asserting considerable inf luence of unspecifiable Egyptian teachings on Pythagoras and Plato, Coleridge compares Greece and Egypt only in terms of their early crude theologies. The Greek mystery religions represented an attempt to overcome this crude (Homeric) theology, an attempt without parallel in Egypt. Some of Coleridge’s marginalia to Tennemann on the Neoplatonists turn on this point, to which I return below. Pythagoras was the first true philosopher, being the first who sought in his own mind for the laws of the universe. Again seeking to reclaim Pythagoras from the taint of Egyptian superstition imposed on him, in Coleridge’s view, by anti-Christian Neoplatonists eager to establish a miracle-working rival to Christ,45 Coleridge emphasizes Pythagoras’ principled exhortations to moral purification. This is moreover an emphasis angled against Tennemann’s view that ‘Ueber die Sittenlehre haben die Pythagoräer nicht viel nachgedacht’ [the Pythagoreans did not ref lect much about ethics].46 Coleridge lacks sufficient evidence to exonerate Pythagoras’ character from all charges of charlatanry, but sets up what may later be recognized as some inf luences on Plato in his description of Pythagoras’ esoteric versus exoteric teachings, and his suggestion that the Pythagorean mystical ‘numbers’ correspond to the Ideas of Plato. Pythagoras’ main philosophical advance was to differentiate subject from object: hitherto no distinction had been drawn between, say, the sensation of heat and the cause of that sensation (confusingly also named heat).47 Pythagoras’ subject–object distinction polarized into two schools of philosophy. On the one hand, the Eleatic system, investing all in the thinking subject, ‘consisted in the blank denial of any true reality in the supposed objects of the senses or of any proper correspondence in external nature to its perceptions’ — hence the famous paradoxes of Zeno disproving the possibility of motion.48 On the other, Democritus invested all in the material world, positing atoms as simultaneously interpenetrable and discrete building-blocks of all things.49 The Eleatic system, though misguided in absolute terms, was honourable in its day in challenging the tyranny of the senses. The atomic system, the anticipator of modern materialism, led directly to the Sophists’ denial of man’s moral responsibility.50 (Coleridge, with his everpresent sense of anticipation and recurring epochs, might have been thinking here of Berkeley’s idealism in opposition to Hobbesian materialism.) Anaxagoras’ postulation of ‘nous’ went some way to reconciling the Eleatic and atomic polarity, but was insufficient as he — like Locke — only introduced this higher principle by

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way of explaining otherwise intractable material phenomena. In religion, sensuous pantheism took over. When Greece had reached this ‘debauched state’, a ‘particular providence’ intervened in the form of the birth of Socrates, who taught earnest ref lection on the nature of the good life.51 Socrates and Plato, Coleridge asserts, looked forward to full revelation — they ‘expected with reverence and hope that an instructor would come’.52 Here again Coleridge is preparing to unite Christianity with Platonism. In Coleridge’s Socrates we catch the first glimpse of a reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities which anticipates Plato and Christ. Atomic philosophy was based exclusively on observation, Eleatic on meditation; so Socrates’ unifying ‘turn for meditative observation’ was the distinctive feature of his ‘genius’.53 This is exactly Coleridge’s recurrent praise of Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s characters are ‘the result of meditation on the design of which observation supplies the drapery’.54 Again, in Socrates’ character was ‘an exquisite balance, [an] equilibrium and harmony of all the various faculties, so that everywhere his mind acted by a sort of tact, as it were, rather than arithmetically’.55 This resembles Coleridge’s idealized description of the poet from as early as 1802: ‘A great Poet must be, implicitè if not explicitè, a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain & Tongue; but he must have it by Tact/’.56 If Socrates is a Coleridgean poet, he is so in a Platonic, anticipatory sense: he possessed ‘a peculiar turn for contemplation not for the purposes of physical truth but in aid of prior truths or anticipations found in his own nature by meditation’.57 Socrates’ meditation, like Shakespeare’s, precedes his observation. It is appropriate to Coleridge’s critical mythology that Socrates should read the book of the world by anticipation, since it is through the figure of Socrates that Plato inculcates the doctrine of anamnesis. This portrait of Socrates as an instinctive poet foreshadows, I think, Coleridge’s appreciation of Plato’s poetic power (usually most evident, after all, in the Socratic dialogues): Plato too ‘employed his observation as the interpreter of his meditation’.58 In Lecture Four Coleridge refers to Plato’s ‘higher genius’, which superseded the family genius for oratory and statesmanship (he was related to Solon): this was probably the poetic genius. For Plato was a poet of such excellence as would have stood all other competition but that of his being a philosopher. His poetic genius imported in him those deep impressions and the love of them which, mocking all comparison with after objects, leaves behind it thirst for something not attained, to which nothing in life is found commensurate and which still impels the soul to pursue.59

There is more than a hint of an idealized self-portrait in this description: from the familiar story of Plato’s forsaking poetry for the sake of his vocation of philosopher, Coleridge calls to mind his sadder personal mythology of the poet who turns to abstruse philosophical research to dampen an excessive sensitivity. At the same time, in compressed form, Coleridge conjures the productive internal struggle of the imaginative genius in the process of anamnesis, just as he had done recently in his Preface to ‘Kubla Khan’. There is yet a further allusion, although few of his audience could have made the connection: Coleridge’s words about Plato recall those of his favourite exemplar of imagination — Wordsworth. In the Prelude

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(around 1805), Wordsworth writes that present memory of his past tuition from Nature is ‘not profitless’ in that . . . . . . the soul, Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not, retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity, to which, With growing faculties she doth aspire, With faculties still growing, feeling still That, whatsoever point they gain, they still Have something to pursue.60

In both passages the final word is ‘pursue’, in both cases attributed to ‘the soul’. Both evoke Platonic anamnesis, Wordsworth’s ‘growing faculties’ recalling (in the context of Coleridge’s lecture) the wings of the soul growing as the charioteer of the Phaedrus pursues the Idea of Beauty. The word ‘still’ clinches the parallel: Wordsworth typically repeats this small word, playing on its dual signification (‘continuingly’; ‘motionless’), while in Coleridge it becomes ‘still impels the soul to pursue’. The theme of uncertain but necessary pursuit, of ‘something ever more about to be’,61 echoes a prominent strain of Plato’s writing. In the Republic Socrates describes the Good as that which every soul pursues, and for the sake of this it does everything, prophesying that it is something, but being dubious, and unable to comprehend sufficiently what it is, and to possess the same stable belief respecting it as of other things.62

The notion of pursuit, and the link between obscurity and the sublime, are key to Coleridge’s comments on Plato at the conclusion of the lecture; but first he attempts a more systematic outline of Plato’s work. Plato’s Esoteric System Coleridge’s account of Plato contains traces of both of the two opposing contem­ porary scholarly approaches. Until Brucker in the mid-eighteenth century, the syncretistic approach exemplified by Cudworth had dominated. Thus learned com­mentaries on Plato expounded his doctrines with reference to a huge range of later writings, including works such as Timaeus Locrus and the Corpus Hermeticum, believed until the late seventeenth century to have preceded and inf luenced Plato. Brucker called for a return to the dialogues themselves, and attacked many later interpretations which he distinguished as ‘Neoplatonic’.63 In Hedley’s words: Until the eighteenth century ‘Platonism’ referred to Plato’s dialogues, the commentaries of the Academy, the comments of certain Church Fathers, and often esoteric writings of vaguely Platonic provenance. The term ‘Neo­ platonism’ arose precisely during the eighteenth century as this very catholic view of Platonism was in decline.64

As often, the change first took place within German scholarship and Coleridge was the first in England to respond to it. OED credits Coleridge with the first use of the word ‘Neoplatonist’, in marginalia published in 1834. He had in fact used it fifteen years earlier, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy.65

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I noted in Chapter 2 that Kant’s revolution in epistemology, ethics, and aesth­ etics provoked a revival of interest in Plato among the German Romantics.66 It was Schl­eier­macher who, beginning with his introduction published in 1804, im­ple­mented Brucker’s demand for a return to the dialogues. Schleiermacher’s Plato is a ‘philosophischer Künstler’ [philosophical artist], and his works form an organic whole with its own spirit, which must be sympathetically grasped without reference to a later tradition or to hypothetical unwritten doctrines. Rejecting the esoteric–exoteric distinction, Schleiermacher attempted for the first time to establish a chronology of Plato’s writings. The post-Lutheran desire of Brucker and Schleiermacher to strip away accretions and penetrate to the original (on the motto sola scriptura) is, as I have mentioned, present in Coleridge too, and it is easy to imagine how congenial he would have found Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic approach to Plato — his disdain for Schleiermacher’s theology of feeling notwithstanding. Coleridge’s emphasis on Plato as a poet does, after all, align him with Schleiermacher. However, there is no evidence that he read Schleiermacher on Plato, despite two tantalizing correspondences. First, Coleridge describes Phaedrus as a ‘juvenile work’, thus contradicting Tennemann’s argument for a later date; Schleiermacher had recently argued in detail that it was Plato’s first work.67 Coburn’s comment was that Coleridge ‘appears to accept Schleiermacher’s dating’.68 Second, Coleridge speaks of making deductions from ‘internal evidence’, which is exactly Schleiermacher’s declared method for his dating system. However, Coleridge neither attempts detailed readings of the dialogues nor mentions Schleiermacher’s text, and in fact he would have found the opinion that Phaedrus was Plato’s first dialogue in the works of two authors he did consult, Gray and Stanley (who cite Diogenes Laertius).69 Insofar as Coleridge and Schleiermacher coincide, then, it is almost certainly a question of ‘genial coincidence’ rather than inf luence. Coleridge was inf luenced, on the other hand, by the other major contemporary interpretation, that of Tennemann — Tennemann’s approach being exactly what Schleiermacher was reacting against. In one sense, Tennemann helped to complete the demolition of the Neoplatonist interpretation of Plato begun by Brucker, rejecting the authority of the Church Fathers, Plotinus, and so on, as keys to Plato. As a later generation of German scholars was to appreciate, Tennemann set a new standard in the writing of philosophical history, establishing many dates and facts about Plato’s life and work. Yet Tennemann shares with the Neoplatonists the assumption that Plato must have had a system, and his ‘own systematization of the Dialogues was [. . .] more akin to the Neoplatonists than he realized’.70 That is, he argues that Plato’s system was unwritten, or esoteric. This remains a tenable view today, but not in the form in which Tennemann pursued it. Whereas the modern approach is to use the ‘indirect tradition’, consisting of the reports of Plato’s followers about his teaching, to fill out what appear to be hints in the dialogues regarding the nature of the Good, and the doctrine of the Two Principles, Tennemann focuses paradoxically on the dialogues themselves, forcing them into harmony with what he took to be the ultimate ‘system’: that of Kant.71 The paradox of Tennemann’s approach to Plato is summed up in his own words: ‘Obgleich seine Schriften mehr Denkmäler seines

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philosophischen und schriftstellerischen Geistes, als seines eigentlichen Systemes sind, so bleiben sie uns doch auch in der letzten Rücksicht ungemein wichtig’ [although his writings are more monuments to his philosophical and literary spirit than to his actual system, nevertheless they remain for us in the final analysis immensely important].72 Unable within the confines of a single lecture to take up Tennemann’s extensive discussion of the Platonic dialogues, Coleridge instead summarizes it through a quotation of about half of Floyer Sydenham’s ‘General View of the Works of Plato’ (1759).73 He repeats the traditional division of the dialogues into ‘sceptical’ and ‘dogmatical’, and further subdivisions.74 He then offers his own opinion that ‘the whole of the substance [. . .] of Plato’s purpose, may be said to be contained in four of his dialogues: the [Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Politicus] and the De Republica’, apparently choosing these, as Jackson observes, for their relevance to ethics.75 Regarding the passage from Sydenham, Jackson’s ‘general rule’ about Coleridge’s borrowings is apposite: ‘the more undigested a borrowing is, the more peripheral it is likely to be to Coleridge’s real interests’.76 The dialogues are dramatically, stylistically, and imaginatively perfect, Coleridge told his audience;77 yet they are only preparatory to the unwritten, esoteric teaching — and here we reach Coleridge’s real interest. The dialogues work, so to speak, by anticipation: ‘all as the introduction to something’, that is, to the esoterica.78 There is no reason to believe that they do not faithfully record the opinions of Socrates. They record Plato’s opinions too, but merely not in their entirety. Plato’s dialogues function much like Coleridge’s Friend: they aim ‘to destroy the Sophistic mode of reasoning, all those false modes of conception, all that want of true induction and of the faculties and habits of true induction which indispose a man’s mind for receiving the truth’.79 This, at least, is the ‘propaedeutic’ part of Plato’s dialogues. In some dialogues there is, further, a positive ‘disciplinary of the intellect’. This proceeds either ‘scientifically’ by taking some known truth and deducing the consequences, or ‘analytically by taking the fact and dividing it into parts, showing that itself confuted what had been deduced from it’.80 The meaning of this deliberately contradictory-sounding second option is not immediately clear, but can be glossed by a note in Logic: When from two premises, both of which are affirmed with equal right by the understanding, the understanding itself by legitimate deductions can arrive at two contradictory conclusions, the only possible solution of the difficulty is found in assuming that the understanding has been applying its own forms and functions, or those which it has borrowed from the sense, to objects which do not fall under its cognisance; as when, for instance, the understanding applies the forms of time and space, of quantity, quality, and relation, to the idea of the Supreme Being, or of things themselves contradistinguished from the phenomena. In these cases, I say that the understanding is indirectly and by negation the organ of the reason, and the exercise of logic for this purpose by the understanding to prove the inadequacy of the understanding constitutes the Platonic dialectic which the divine philosopher calls the wings by which philosophy first raises herself from the ground.81

This is a notion which Coleridge only hints at in the Lectures — perhaps regarding

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it as part of his own esoterica, not to be fully divulged to the lecture-audience — but which in later comments on Plato he consistently repeats.82 Even without the Kantian context of the Logic it is clear that in this passage Coleridge is reading the Socratic dialogues through Kant’s Antinomies of Reason. At the same time, however, he is correcting Kant through Plato. Whereas Kant argues that two logically correct yet mutually contradictory propositions demonstrate that we cannot know the solution, for Coleridge’s Plato they demonstrate the need for a ‘higher logic’ at the level of Reason rather than Understanding. Coleridge therefore uses the word ‘dialectic’ both in the explicitly negative sense of the first Critik and in the potentially positive, Greek sense of (literally) science of dialogue. Platonic dialectic reveals contradictions at the level of Understanding in order to enable apprehension of Ideas of Reason. This is what Coleridge means by saying that an Idea is expressed in a contradiction: it is (as he wrote in 1827) the common character, the criterion and diagnostic of Ideas, that they are expressible only by two positions the one of which affirms what the other denies — the Discursive Faculty confessing, as it were, the transcendence and alien nature of the Truth strives by words to suggest what no words can indeed express.83

This curious way of explaining the foundation of Plato’s dialectic may have had more inf luence on later Plato scholarship in England than one might expect. As late as 1928–29 Paul Shorey indignantly complained about its effect on the Plato translations of Benjamin Jowett: This Coleridgian poison has been widely diffused by Jowett, who attributes to Plato a Hegelian logic of the future — which is the polar antithesis of the true Platonic dialectic. [. . .] The higher logic is to philosophy, what the higher law is to a criminal court — an evasion of responsibility.84

But that is to anticipate. In turning from the dialogues to something ‘higher’, Coleridge is adapting Tennemann’s exposition of the esoteric–exoteric distinction, and thus apparently abandoning the more Schleiermacher-like appreciation of the poetic qualities of the dialogues. Coleridge explains that although Plato did not desire to withhold truth from those who sought it, he divided his lectures (like Pythagoras before him) into ‘popular and scientific, or [exoteric and esoteric]’.85 This comment is taken directly from Tennemann.86 Tennemann cites the Seventh Letter as proof of Plato’s withholding certain ideas from the public on principle. He mentions ‘den damaligen politischen und schriftstellerischen Verhältnissen’ [the political and literary relationships at that time] as limiting freedom of speech;87 and Coleridge echoes this: ‘In a republic where the mob were to be the judge’ and where Socrates was martyred it was dangerous to speak out openly in religious and philosophical matters.88 This is the same ground as Coleridge gives for Kant’s maintaining an esoteric doctrine. Tennemann then appositely translates nearly the whole of the last section of Phaedrus on the inferiority of the written to the spoken word.89 His general comment is that Plato regarded the relationship of his writings to his inner ‘Gedankensystem’ [system of thought] as that of shadow to light: he felt it partly impossible, partly unethical to commit his whole system to writing.90 According to Tennemann, and Coleridge agrees, Aristotle too had an esoteric

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doctrine, but for Aristotle this meant merely a different level of technicality of presentation, whereas Plato’s esoteric teaching actually had a different content from the exoteric. Tennemann therefore refers to Plato’s ‘geheime’ [secret] philosophy. Tennemann thus dubiously implies (as Hegel observed) that philosophers possess a number of discrete ideas, some of which they can choose to mete out to the public, others of which can remain ‘esoteric’; whereas it would be truer to say (with Hegel) that the idea possesses the philosopher, so that none of Plato’s doctrines could be called purely esoteric or purely exoteric. ‘Esoteric’ is a helpful term to denote the different level of teaching Plato attempted in the Academy from that contained in the written dialogues, but in Tennemann’s usage it suggests something unnecessarily mysterious. There is no evidence, for instance, for Tennemann’s statement that Plato thought it impossible to write all his doctrines down — rather Plato declares that it would be unhelpful or dangerous.91 This f lavour of mystery, however, does inform Coleridge’s discussion of the esoterica. Tennemann judges Plato’s caution in withholding certain doctrines to have been wise.92 He offers four of his own possible reasons for it. First, at that time philosophical language was not yet advanced enough to achieve the requisite precision in the profoundest investigations. (Coleridge would agree that language can develop, but would be too wary of condescension towards the ancients to repeat the idea in this form.) Second, misunderstandings could too easily occur, especially of new ideas. If Plato had difficulty in expressing his thoughts, how much more difficulty would readers have! Third, an explanation of the esoteric would necessarily touch on socially taboo subjects, especially in the area of religion. Fourth, even given the restricted reading public of that time, there was no ensuring that books would fall only into the safe hands of those fit to receive their ideas.93 Coleridge does not repeat these thoughts of Tennemann, instead offering as the main justification for esoterica the Coleridgean attitude of odi profanum vulgus: like the Pythagorean elect, the few who received Plato’s esoteric teaching must undergo prior moral purification. Plato had ‘a sense of high responsibility not to do mischief and arm fools with fire under the pretence of conveying truth’.94 This was precisely the concern with which Coleridge (exoterically) wrestles in the essays ‘On the Communication of Truth’ in The Friend. If ‘the doctrines of Plato that constitute the proper platonism are not to be found in his own writings [. . .] where are we to find them?’, Coleridge asks. He does not take up Tennemann’s answer here.95 Coleridge is optimistic about the possibility of reconstructing the ‘unwritten dogmata’,96 but reluctant to make the attempt himself. As in the advice to young clergymen I quoted earlier, he envisages certain tasks for the next generation of scholars.97 In Lecture Five he nevertheless detects a further hint as to ‘the sacred recesses of this interior doctrine’ in a fragment of Speusippus which Tennemann treats with ‘utter inattention’;98 Coleridge states that ‘the ancients’ testify to Speusippus having added nothing to his master’s philosophy. The intelligential power, Nous or Logos, is said in this fragment to be ‘indivisibly united with, yet not the same as, the absolute principle of causation, [the paternal One]’; it is also united yet not identical with ‘the energy of love, the sanctifying spirit’, which Coleridge identifies with the Holy Ghost.99

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Coleridge’s next proof of Platonic esoterica is that certain followers of Plato in the Academy, including Speusippus, maintained ‘zealously, dogmatically, positively’ doctrines which never appear so positively in the dialogues. (Modern attempts to discern Plato’s esoteric teaching also begin from this kind of deduction, confirming Coleridge’s intuition.) These doctrines include the immortality of the soul: the material world as the proximate cause, but by no means as the absolute origin, of pain and imperfection in the world; and, lastly, the reconciliation of man, and in the human being of the whole creation, with the Deity, as the only remedy of those evils.100

Coleridge thus turns aside from Tennemann’s Kantian agenda to his own as a Christian polemicist. He had brought Lecture Four to a crescendo with the assertion that Plato engendered general dissatisfaction with the old, hollow religion, and claimed that purification could only be accomplished by ‘the Realiser’.101 Now he intimates that the Trinity and the need for a Redeemer might have been among the esoterica: this is now a Plato in the tradition of Augustine’s Contra Academicos. Following the extended comparison of Plato and Aristotle as types for two representative classes of men,102 Coleridge devotes a lecture (Six) to the decline of philosophy with Epicureanism, Scepticism, and Stoicism — ending with Christ presented as the ‘perfect philosopher’, the ‘divine medium between the opposite and jarring extremes of men’.103 At the marriage feast at Cana, Christ showed neither the unreasonable, austere self-denial of the Cynics, nor the sensual indulgence of the Epicureans; severe as the Stoics he enjoins perfection, yet unlike the Stoics teaches that man must not rely on himself alone, and that the body is an integral part of man and will be resurrected.104 There is again a hint that Christ’s coming was a fulfilment of Plato’s assertion of to theion, albeit Plato’s God was not the ‘living God’ to whom we can say ‘Our Father’.105 Christ is the culmination of all the patterns of anticipation in the first half of the lecture-series — semi-prophesied by Plato and, like Plato, synthesizing the best of what went before. The Esoteric Debate with Tennemann Coleridge, like Schleiermacher, hoped to separate the actual philosophy of Plato from the accretions of later traditions; but unlike Schleiermacher he believed that this process involved full engagement with the Neoplatonists. His proposal consisted in ‘having formed a complete notion of what Platonism became, then to come to the Source’.106 This is necessarily an esoteric activity, ref lected but not directly undertaken in the Lectures, since Neoplatonism is obscure, and its evaluation made yet more complex by the fact that from Coleridge’s perspective, the Neoplatonists are related to the post-Kantians ‘by anticipation’. I have called Coleridge’s presentation of Plato Janus-faced, for not only does he recall Pythagoras in the matters of esoterica, moral purification, and a system based on numbers-Ideas, but also looks forward to Christ. There is another Janusaspect to the Coleridgean Plato, though, in that to understand him fully demands a critical reading of his followers; while that in turns requires a backward glance to Pythagoras, since it was a common Neoplatonist claim that Pythagoras and Plato

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were linked in drawing their wisdom from Egyptian theurgists, who enjoyed divine revelation. As Tennemann rather neatly sums up Iamblichus’ account: Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, und Pythagoras ‘trauen jetzt in brüderliche Eintracht zusammen, als unmittelbare Überlieferer und Ausleger der göttlichen Offenbarung’ [now join together in brotherly concord, as immediate handers-down and interpreters of the divine revelation].107 Though Coleridge agreed with Iamblichus to the extent of discerning a spark of revelation in both Pythagoras and Plato, he locates its source not in the unwholesome idol-worship of Egypt, but rather in the Christian God himself. Coleridge thus estimates the Neoplatonists according to their attitudes to Christianity. Plotinus he regards highly (albeit with reservations), but as to the followers of Plotinus and their elevation of Pythagoras against Christ, Coleridge exclaims indignantly: How low must the Neoplatonists or Eclectic Philosophers have sunk, when the most famous of them, Iamblichus & Porphyry can gravely relate such trash. — Twenty two years in Egypt from Priest to Priest, and then goes to school again to learn common morals and cyphering from the Magi at Babylon!!/ The trick is as gross as its purpose is palpable. Pythagoras was to be set up against Christ, and all the superstitions of the East were to be f lattered into the conspiracy.108

For Coleridge, these writers’ anti-Christian prejudice makes them unreliable not just in their arguments, but more importantly in their reporting of others. As he says in the lecture on Plato, great caution must therefore be exercised in extrapolating Plato’s doctrines from them.109 Annotating Stanley, Coleridge writes: ‘Iamblichus and Porphyry are worse than no authorities’.110 Stanley, essentially an anthologist, tends to mix authorities together indiscriminately, and despite a compelling narrative has no line of interpretation. Coleridge noticed this, declaring Stanley’s explanation of Pythagoras’ system, for instance, ‘merely popular and exoteric’.111 Tennemann is a much more interesting sounding-board for Coleridge, and much of the Coleridgean esoterica running beneath the surface of the lectures is to be found in the extensive marginalia to Tennemann’s eleven volumes. It should be clear from the foregoing discussion why this is not so much in the volume covering Plato, but mainly in volume six on the ‘Neoplatonic and Alexandrian philosophy’. Tennemann, a disciple of the critical philosophy, does not blindly trust authorities, and attacks the ‘Schwärmereien’ [enthusiastic raptures] of the Alexandrians and Neoplatonists (with a disapproving eye on Fichte and Schelling). However, lacking Coleridge’s investment in the Christian narrative, he is willing at least to concede sincerity to them: he argues that accusations of Porphyry’s partisanship, lying, and lack of judgement are exaggerated, calls him ‘ein ehrlicher Mann’ [an honest man], and quotes his ‘Life of Plotinus’ extensively without demur.112 Tennemann’s narrative is broadly as follows. Scepticism, represented chief ly by Sextus Empiricus, had so powerfully eroded traditional doctrines that those (beginning with Ammonius Saccas, the teacher of Plotinus) who wished to claim metaphysical knowledge resorted in desperation to ‘schöpferische Phantasie’ [creative imagination] in place of the patient explorations of Reason. The conviction arose that the Absolute could be grasped directly, ‘durch unmittelbare Anschauung’ [through immediate

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intuition].113 Raised above all doubts, this claim to immediate knowledge of the divine — fuelled by strong imagination — was immune to the logical corrosion of scepticism. Tennemann’s censure of this attitude recalls that of Kant in the Transcendental Dialectic and the polemical essay ‘On a Lately Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy’.114 From the same perspective, Tennemann insists that it is more difficult and more scientific to work at the simultaneous broadening of reason into systematic unity and setting it within its possible bounds, than to reject the attempt to ground philosophy and take refuge in a spurious ‘Gewißheit’ [certainty].115 Of this charge Plotinus is as guilty as his followers. Coleridge’s esoteric argument with Tennemann turns on the fact that the German author ‘saw everything thro’ the Spectacles of Kant, or rather of Kanteanism’.116 This is undeniable: from the beginning of volume one Tennemann introduces philosophy in Kantian terms, assumes that Kant has satisfactorily defined the territory of philosophy, and in short is ‘a Kantist’, as Tennemann’s English translator judged.117 Coleridge’s qualifying clause, ‘or rather of Kanteanism’, ref lects the fact that Tennemann’s true allegiance was to the version of Kant promoted by Reinhold, which tended to present the Critiques as forming an already completed system, rather than as groundwork for further thought. In Coleridge’s marginalia, the evaluation of the Neoplatonists is really a secondary issue, the nub being what the lectures only touch on: ‘the true and platonic theory of Ideas’.118 If Ideas are merely regulative, as for Kant and Tennemann, things-in-themselves remain radically unknowable, and the claim to intellectual intuition or ‘unmittelbare Anschauung’ is mystical in a meaningless sense. If Ideas are constitutive, as for Coleridge and Plato, the empirical model of the subject (mind) perceiving the object (Idea) actually dissolves, since the Ideas (so to speak) inform the mind. Thus whereas Tennemann thinks it an ‘Irrthum’ [error] of Plato that he regards Ideas not as the products of Reason, but as conceptions given to the Reason, Coleridge replies: ‘So it appears, in many passages of Plato’s Works: and yet I cannot help doubting whether this was his inward meaning. Is not the Reason itself an Idea in his sense?’119 Admitting ‘constitutive’ Ideas, it becomes possible to speak of intellectual intuition. Tennemann, argues Coleridge, as a ‘Kantéan’ who squawks the ‘Rote of a Parrot caged in the study of that great Modern’,120 cannot apprehend the ‘constitutive’ position. Coleridge’s first annotation is a challenge to a future scholar — probably poor Green himself, who like a Speusippus to Coleridge’s Plato was to spend the rest of his life trying to organize his master’s esoterica into presentable form — to put the facts and quotations in Tennemann’s volumes into two columns, one explaining the Sense which the words would bear, if the Philosopher, from whom the Dogma is extracted, had been exclusively a Categoric or Verstandsphilosoph: while in an opposite Column should be given the Sense, which the same words would bear, if we suppose him to have used them as Symbols of Ideas.121

Modern research confirms Coleridge’s critique of Tennemann: as Michael Franz explains in detail, the basis of Tennemann’s total misunderstanding of Platonic philosophy was his attempt to force Plato’s doctrine of Ideas into the Kantian regulative model, despite the fact that Kant himself had distinguished himself from Plato on exactly this score.122 Coleridge’s critique can best be elucidated

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with reference to his thorough annotation to Tennemann’s comparison of Plato with Plotinus, which is representative of many similar annotations. Plato is full of undeveloped ideas, according to Tennemann, perfect for an imaginative young man to seize upon with eclectic enthusiasm.123 ‘[E]s liegt in ihm ein so fruchtbarer Keim des Enthusiasmus und der Schwärmerei’ [there lies in him such a fertile germ of enthusiasm and fanaticism] that it is understandable that an enthusiast like Plotinus, responding to the scepticism of Late Antiquity, should unwittingly develop Plato in a new, unbounded direction. Plato stellte einen rationalen Dogmatismus auf, der sich vermittelst reiner Begriffe durch das Denken zu der Urquelle alles Seyns und Denkens erhob. Das realste Wesen ist der Schlußstein seines ganzen Systems; nimmt man dieses Weg, so ist keine Antwort möglich auf die Frage, wie es möglich sey, das der Mensch durch Ideen, die er doch nicht aus der Erfahrung genommen, eine reale Erkenntnis von den Objeckten ihrem objecktiven Seyn nach erhalte. Diese hyperphysische Ableitung der Ideen abgerechnet, behandelt er sie ganz als menschliche Begriffe, raisonniret mit ihnen nach der Regeln der Logik. Dialektik und Metaphysik ist ihm eins. Es ist ihm der erste Grundsatz alles Philosophirens, daß man das Uebersinnliche, das wahre Seyn, so wie auch den letzten Realgrund alles Seyns nur durch Denken, durch logischen Gebrauch der Ideen finden könne. Mit einem Worte, der Mensch hat ein höheres Erkenntnißvermögen, und dieses ist die reine Vernunft. [Plato set up a rational dogmatism that rose by means of pure concepts through thought to the very source of all being and thought. The most real being is the capstone of his whole system; take this away, then no answer is possible to the question, how it is possible that man can receive, through ideas which he has however not taken from experience, a real cognition of the objects according to their objective being. Apart from the supernatural derivation of the ideas, he treats them completely as human conceptions, and reasons with them according to the rules of logic. Dialectic and metaphysics are one to him. The fundamental principle of all philosophizing for him is that one can find the supersensuous, true being, as well as the ultimate foundation of all being, solely through thought, through the logical use of ideas. In a word, man has a higher cognitive faculty, and this is pure reason.]124

Tennemann then states that this faculty of pure Reason was, however, already suspect, partly because it gave such widely divergent answers, partly because of the sceptics’ critique. Later, Plotinus posited a new ‘higher cognitive faculty’ (‘höhern Erkenntnisvermögens’) according to which dialectic and metaphysics were not one: dialectic was merely preparation through words for the real apprehension of meta­ physical objects, things in themselves.125 In the passage just quoted Tennemann seems to suggest that although Plato claimed a supersensuous126 origin for Ideas, his actual method was (fortunately) the reverse, and he attempted to ascend gradually to the supersensuous through the use of pure Reason — an illegitimate extension of Reason’s capability, admittedly, but beginning from the right direction, not leaping to the claim of intellectual intuition. Plotinus, though, made just that leap. For Coleridge this dichotomy between Plato and Plotinus is false, even if it is assumed that Plato’s dialogues are more than mere preparation for his full teaching. He objects to the passage italicized above, first

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because it confounds ‘Reason with Reasoning, ideas with abstracta’. Tennemann, that is to say, clings to the non-Platonic definition of ‘idea’ as abstraction from sense data: he envisages Plato reaching dogmatic conclusions by logical analysis of ‘ideas’, by ‘mere purification of concepts’ as Coleridge paraphrases the argument; whereas for Coleridge’s Plato, Ideas are identical with Reason itself. Second, the passage is based on Kant’s Antinomies, which themselves are founded on Kant’s fundamental error, the derivation of Ideas from the speculative Reason entirely, for the behoof indeed of the practical Reason & Active Principle, but not by means thereof, or in conjunction therewith: which latter is nevertheless the true and platonic theory of Ideas — .127

This is nothing if not esoteric; but it is a good example of Coleridge’s reading of Kant through a Platonic lens. Coleridge is developing a conviction he had recorded nine years before, ‘of the dependence of the speculative on the practical reason’.128 The Platonic doctrine of Ideas, for Coleridge, expresses the priority of the practical, i.e. the moral: Will is the fundamental principle which Kant had shied away from asserting. He explains: Kant supposed the Ideas to be the Oscillations of the same Imagination, which working determinately produces the Mathematical intuitions, line, circle &c — [. . .] Whereas according to the true platonic view, the Reason and the Will are the Parents [. . .] and the Idea itself the transcendent Analagon [sic] of the imag.n or die spirituelle Anschauung — spiritual Intuition.129

Coleridge especially objects to Tennemann’s above-quoted phrase ‘apart from the supernatural derivation of the Ideas’, since it is precisely the ‘supernatural derivation’ of the Ideas which differentiates them from mere concepts (‘Begriffe’): As if the super-natural Derivation of Ideas in the Platonic Scheme [. . .] as if the whole doctrine of Reminiscence — did not suppose the reality of intellectual intuition, as an Attribute of the Soul, and its actual existence under certain Conditions, and that it exists potentially even during the eclipse of the Opake Body!

Coleridge refers (unspecifically) to Laws, Republic, and Phaedrus to support his argument: he might be thinking of Phaedrus’ charioteer, the symbol for the soul, beholding the vision of the Ideas in direct proportion as he resists the pull of the unruly black horse towards earth and material desires. The body is ‘opake’ in that it ‘eclipses’, that is obstructs, intellectual intuition. ‘Now if this opacity relative to the Soul could not be diminished, to what purpose Plato’s various ασκητικα και καθαρτικα/ [ascetic and purifying measures]?’130 This glances back to the reason for Plato’s maintaining esoteric doctrines which Coleridge did not draw from Tennemann: the initiates must undergo moral purification. Now Coleridge aligns Plotinus with Plato’s pursuit of intellectual intuition: ‘the Ground of the Plotinian Philosophy [. . .] is a clear and positive Exposition of Ideas — the doctrine rather hinted by Plato in his Writings than set forth’.131 The true contrast between Plato and Plotinus is that while the latter discusses Ideas positively, the former ‘gave little more than their negative character — i.e. what they were not’. Here is Coleridge’s Platonic version of the Kantian Antinomies once again:

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Plato’s principal Object was to insinuate on every opportunity the insufficiency and alien nature of Conceptions formed by the Ref lection (= Verstand, Understanding, Λογος ψιλανθροπος )( Vernunft, Reason, Νους) in relation to the proper objects of Philosophy [. . .] viz. the Soul, Moral Freedom, God) — and this he effected by deducing contradictory results or absurdities from premises logically (ως κατα λογον) undeniable.132

Coleridge draws from this a statement with which Kant and Tennemann could have agreed: If then neither the Conceptions formed by the Understanding from Materials furnished by Sense, nor the Notions formed by the U. by ref lection on its own processes were the proper Organs for the knowledge of supersensuous Truths, either such knowledge is impossible for man — or there must exist other and higher Organs or Media.

But now comes the differentiation from Kant: ‘Plato assumed the latter and named these Media Ideas’.133 ‘The Idea is [. . .] spiritual Intuition’, to abbreviate Coleridge’s above-quoted definition. As becomes clear a few pages later, the word ‘spiritual’ is carefully chosen to signal his dissent from Tennemann’s usage, ‘intellektuelle’ (‘intellectual’, which I have retained in my discussion because it is both more familiar and used by Coleridge outside of this particular context). ‘Spiritual’ connotes the Platonic emphasis on moral purity that Tennemann neglects. Coleridge comments: ‘Tennemann talks indeed of intellectual Intuition, but the epithet is a mere pleonasm, a true expletive: for he means, and has no thing else in his thought but, the common or sensuous Intuition’.134 As Coleridge rightly goes on to observe, Tennemann gives the impression that ‘Plotinus asserted the existence of a vast Panorama in his Mind at which his Imagination was gazing’.135 To repeat, this is for Coleridge a false model. From his perspective, Platonic Idealism attempts to resolve the problematic paradigm of a subject beholding an object (as occurs in senseperception), and indeed he pronounces that ‘The Subjectivity of Reason is the great Error of the Kantean System’.136 Whether Kant’s system does unequivocally require the subjectivity of Reason remains a major debate, of course, but in Tennemann’s interpretation this assertion is fair. Platonism, as Coleridge defines it against ‘Kanteanism’, gives an account of Reason and Ideas as ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ simultaneously: Coleridge imagines Plotinus replying to Tennemann by asserting that there are Thoughts that are not simply and distinctly Subjective, Thoughts (if so you will call them) that are not of the same class with the Conceptions of the Understanding, the reality or objective Validity of which is derived from the Senses. To distinguish the one from the other, I name the former, Ideas.137

Coleridge suggests that Tennemann misunderstands Plotinus so fundamentally because he has substituted paper-promises for gold and silver: he has ‘so long and with so much comfort and convenience’ used the First Critique ‘as a Carpenter’s rule for Reason, that he at length identified it with Reason itself ’.138

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Plato’s Idea, Coleridge’s Symbol, Wordsworth’s Sublime Key to the passage just discussed and to the marginalia throughout is Tennemann’s supposed misunderstanding of the nature of Ideas. This is related to Coleridge’s objection to Tennemann’s covert attacks on ‘the Natur-philosophie of Schelling and his School’, which proceed by suggesting the identity of the latter with the ‘system’ of Proclus and Plotinus and attacking that instead.139 Tennemann simply assumes ‘the falsehood of the Assumption that there exist Ideas in which the identity of Subject and Objective is’.140 Coleridge’s objection is embodied in this expressively awkward clause, ending teutonically with the verb: ‘is’. This ref lects Coleridge’s habitual emphasis on the mystery of Being, expressed in The Friend as ‘existence in and for itself ’, and similar to Wordsworth’s insistence on the propriety of his line in ‘The Leech-Gatherer’, ‘an old man was’: ‘not stood, not sat, but “was” ’.141 For what is at stake is the actual existence (not merely the regulative use) of Ideas; and according to Coleridge, the identity of Subject and Object subsists in certain Ideas — as he takes both Plotinus and Schelling to have indicated. That is another way to affirm the active, constitutive status of Ideas. On this insight depends further the ‘true and platonic’ account of symbolism: ‘An IDEA, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol’.142 Coleridge elsewhere defines ‘symbol’ by desynonymizing it from ‘allegory’. An allegory is mere picture-language, an abstraction from objects of sense-perception. It tells one thing while signifying another. A symbol, on the other hand, is ‘tautegorical’, consubstantial with the reality it represents.143 That is to say, the symbol is an integral part of the whole reality; the reality cannot be thought without the symbol. Tennemann, in Coleridge’s view, inevitably misrepresents Plotinus, but also the ancient Mystery religions, as merely allegorical — conveniently providing pictures to help the feeble-minded to grasp abstract notions. Coleridge implies that only degenerate religions submit to the despotism of the eye in this way (Catholicism would be the prime culprit): true religion, on the other hand, consists of a reverence for the invisible. A few years later Coleridge was to unfold his view, already in embryo here, that the myths taught in the Mysteries and embellished by the tragic poets were in fact symbols, offering partial glimpses of the true esoteric doctrine known to philosophers such as Plato, but without recklessly revealing everything to the uninitiated mass.144 Three distinctions, then, run parallel: allegory-symbol; regulative-constitutive; exoteric-esoteric; and the two more famous Coleridgean distinctions could be placed beside these: Fancy-Imagination; Understanding-Reason. I think these distinctions indicate a unifying possibility for what I have presented above as a dichotomy, Coleridge’s perception of Plato first as a poet, and second and apparently more earnestly as an esoteric system-builder. The written dialogues are exoteric, address the Understanding (with the ultimate aim of pointing to the inadequacy of that faculty in apprehending Ideas), and, suggests Coleridge, are written to a large extent on the level of allegory. The latter suggestion appears in Coleridge’s comparison of the Republic with the obviously allegorical Bunyan:

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Plato’s Republic is like Bunyan’s Town of Man-Soul, — a description of an individual, all of whose faculties are in their proper subordination and interdependence; and this it is assumed may be the prototype of the state as one great individual.145

Coleridge asserts that all ‘truly great men’ have admired the Republic, but not with regard to the practical, for he would greatly mistake the dialogue who supposed Plato believed, that Plato thought, it all practical, but as ideas, known to be unapproachable as to realization, but they were to be a polar star, guiding a man’s mind by approximation. And there he stopped.146

That last little sentence is uncharacteristically brief, yet Coleridge repeats it: ‘There he stopped’. The abruptness seems hardly accidental, since there Coleridge stops too: in other words for the lecture-audience he is willing to do no more than hint at the process by which the mind leaps beyond the regulative Idea as polar star expressed in allegorical form, to the apprehension of constitutive Ideas as expressed in symbols. Where Plato’s written, exoteric, poetically suggestive work stops, there the truly perceptive reader rises into the realm of Reason, the unwritten, the esoteric. Such a perceptive reader will be not a logician or professor of philosophy, at least primarily, but an artist. Therefore, whereas the suggestion Coleridge makes exoterically (so to speak) is that it may be possible to reconstruct Plato’s secret teaching by sifting the technical remarks of Aristotle and Speusippus, he in fact hints at Plato’s hidden meaning by discussing what was ‘really inf luential in Plato’. Two broad historical inf luences are suggested. First, Plato — like Bacon, whom Coleridge often mentions in such a context — taught correct scientific method, whereby we seek ‘the principles, that charm and spell by which nature is to be invoked in reason itself [. . . . . .and] the confirmation of those principles by induction’.147 This seems to correspond to the use of the regulative Idea. Second, and ‘above all’, the Ideas negatively expounded by Plato have informed the sublime efforts of imaginative artists: he taught the idea, namely the possibility and the duty of all who would arrive at the greatest perfection of the human mind of striving to contemplate things not in the phenomenon, not in their accidents or in their superficies, but in their essential powers, first as they exist in relation to other powers co-existing with them, but lastly and chief ly as they exist in the Supreme Mind, independent of all material division, distinct and yet indivisible.148

The constitutive nature of ‘the idea’ is suggested by the word ‘striving’: the Idea itself consists in the virtuous (‘duty’-bound) striving of the human mind to contemplate it. For Coleridge, Platonic contemplation is an effortful rather than tranquil process, as already intimated by the phrase he used earlier in speculating about Plato’s psychological development, ‘still impels the soul to pursue’. That the Ideas are in the divine mind is strictly a Neoplatonic doctrine — at least it is not expressed in Plato’s exoteric work — but it does serve to support Coleridge’s ‘constitutive’ theory.149 The way the word ‘in’ echoes through the sentence just quoted recalls the incantatory description of primary Imagination as ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’; indeed, on De Paolo’s reading, ‘the Primary Imagination, the medium through which Divine Ideas are intuited, establishes the

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intradeical ground of Ideas’.150 The rather confused paragraph that follows further recalls the Biographia’s concept of Imagination. Coleridge continues: ‘it is the very essential of Platonism when he says that that which exists in the perfection of distinctness, and yet without separation either from another or from the supreme cause, is an idea’.151 It is frustrating that the text does not make it clear who ‘he’ is: E. H. Coleridge conjectured ‘Plato’; Coburn and Jackson, ‘Plotinus’. But the textual confusion is emblematic of Coleridge’s frequent failure to distinguish Plato from his successors, important though he holds that distinction to be in principle. (It might even be said that the point at which Plato and Plotinus become indistinguishable is the point at which Coleridge seeks access to the unwritten Plato.) Coleridge acknowledges the obscurity of the passages just quoted with the rhetorical question, ‘What can such an abstract notion as this produce, it may be said?’ In answer, Coleridge holds its very indefiniteness up as a productive virtue: The human passions and human energies do not close on my natural vacuity with any distinct palpable visible forms.152 The mind always feels itself greater than aught it has done. It begins in the act of perceiving that it must go beyond it in order to comprehend it, therefore it is only to that which contains distinct conception in itself, and thereby satisfying the intellect does at the same time contain in it a plenitude which refuses limitation or division, that the soul feels its full faculties called forth.153

This is obscure because the ‘it’ which the mind must ‘go beyond’ lacks a clear referent; perhaps this ‘it’ refers to whatever the mind has done, i.e. a distinct conception whose origin could be referred to one particular faculty rather than another. Whereas, on the other hand, the soul feels its full faculties called forth only to that which contains (i) distinct conception in itself, thereby satisfying the intellect; and (ii) a plenitude which refuses limitation or division. This must be a description of an Idea. The plenitude of the Idea, refusing limitation, makes it difficult to express in words. This passage has an affinity both verbal and conceptual with the definition of the poet in the Biographia: ‘The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity’.154 Indeed, the portrayal of Plato as a poet is explicitly reintroduced in the continuation of the above passage: Such is the origin of all great ideas on which [Plato] works. How the grand idea of the universe worked in him before it found utterance! In how many obscure and, as it were, oracular, sentences, in what strange symbols did it place itself!155

Coleridge’s repetition of the word ‘in’ again expresses the interpenetration between the Idea and the inspired mind. Most important is that the Idea places itself — actively, constitutively — in symbols. The symbols are strange, like the ‘mystic symbols’ of the imaginary chapter on imagination in the Biographia,156 because of the formidable ‘plenitude’ of the Ideas they are to body forth. This begins to be elaborated in what follows: ‘All great and bold ideas in their first conception partake in their nature, they are utterly . . . it is a glow without light, in which light gradually forms itself ’.157 This sentence is truncated, but Jackson refers to one of Coleridge’s manuscript notes for clarification:

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At all times great and bold Ideas, at their first conception in the soul and while yet they stir therein and reveal themselves only as obscure Presentiments, are wont to be incommunicable by the Mouth, too large for utterance, and so hover round the Mind formless, or like a Glow without Light. The first attempts to subdue them to words characterized by their simplicity — nay not seldom does the grandeur of the Conception [? with] its half-form, like a self-shaping Mist, impose on the Discoverer a belief that it was revealed to him — 158

Assuming the lecturer really did say this with regard to Plato (and it does follow reasonably from the passage just quoted on ‘strange symbols’), a curious tension appears in Coleridge’s view of Plato. Coleridge had presented the dialogues as models of unmysterious practical wisdom and reasoning, appreciable by such eighteenth-century figures as Sydenham and Gray whom Coleridge considers worthy but uninspired. Yet these passages later in the same lecture present a sublime, initially incoherent Plato, not so far from ‘the wild-minded disciple of Socrates’ of whom Coleridge spoke in 1795. The ‘simplicity’ of the first attempts to subdue Ideas to words and the belief that ‘it was revealed’ align Plato with a host of Coleridgean mystics, chief ly Böhme.159 Coleridge’s very early sense of ‘the sunny Mist, the luminous gloom of Plato — ’ seems always to have remained, perhaps modulated by his own struggles with the attempt to interpret inspired experience philosophically.160 It is rather disappointing that Coleridge cites no textual evidence for this sublimely incoherent Plato. The closest Coleridge comes to offering any evidence is his above-quoted reference to Phaedrus as being a ‘juvenile work’, perhaps thinking of the exuberance of the passages on divine madness. However, Coleridge is really describing something more esoteric, behind the veil of the dialogues: the unwritten Plato. He makes clear that he is speaking about a necessary stage in Plato’s mind prior to the careful crafting of the dialogues: ‘How the grand idea of the universe worked in him before it found utterance’.161 As earlier, Coleridge’s vocabulary — ‘worked’ suggesting the beginnings of a process of shaping — might remind us of Wordsworth: in book one of the Prelude, the powers of nature make ‘The surface of the universal earth [. . .] Work like a sea’; and shortly prior to this, ‘for many days my brain | Work’d with a dim and undetermin’d sense | Of unknown modes of being’.162 Wordsworth, like Coleridge’s Plato, felt a grand idea to have worked in him, indefinable in words yet definite in its effect. In Lecture Four, then, there are in fact two versions of Plato as poet: the mystical enthusiast and the educated writer, which correspond to Coleridge’s belief in primary and secondary powers of the mind. I highlighted above the continuities in Coleridge’s language between the description of constitutive Ideas in Lecture Four and the description of Imagination in the Biographia: both are at first formless, both therefore work through ‘mystic symbols’, both bring the whole soul of man into activity. Wordsworth, the exemplar of Imagination in the Biographia, could also illustrate the struggle of the Platonic philosopher to articulate an Idea. Two especially ‘sublime’ passages in the Prelude, on the crossing of the Alps (Book VI) and on the Cave of Yordas (Book VIII), were reworked from a draft manuscript which shows something of what Coleridge means by the difficulty of utterance during the initial working of the Idea. When Wordsworth hears from the peasant

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who has crossed the Alps, it is as though he has passed from the light of day into a cave: at length the roof A mass of solid stone yet all alive With [?restless] fermentation The effort & the quality of smoke Substance & shadow light & darkness all Commingling making up a canopy Of Shapes & forms that [?change & interchange] Like spectres, ferment quiet & sublime That work [less] & less . . . Till every effort every motion gone The vault before him lies in perfect view He reads distinctly as a written book . . . And grieves at the remembrance of his loss . . . Imagination! rising up at once Like an unfatherd vapour here I paused was lost awhile as in A cloud . . . Have found [my] strength & I have broken through The darkness that was [?upon] me And populous images before me stand163

An urgent and barely decipherable scribble, Wordsworth’s unpunctuated and un­polished lines manifest most of the qualities Coleridge seeks in his mystical Plato. The cave would certainly qualify as a ‘strange symbol’, there being no neat allegorical correspondence between the cave (reminiscent of Plato’s cave though it may be) and the mind. There is what Coleridge calls ‘a glow without light’, since although something can be seen, the viewer’s eyes must accustom themselves with difficulty to the darkness; the mind is in a state of striving or ‘effort’; and there is that palpable, physical quality to the vision (‘solid stone yet all alive’) which Coleridge discerns in mystical experience. Again, the ‘ferment quiet and sublime’ of indistinct forms appears to come from without, like the sense of revelation felt by Plato, but when the effort and motion give way to a ‘perfect view’ it appears that the mind itself was the originator. This distinctness brings a sense of ‘loss’, as the moment of vision is now only a ‘remembrance’: like the early, unfulfilled vision of Coleridge’s Plato, which evermore ‘still impels the soul to pursue’. The ‘written book’ cannot adequately ref lect the Idea; when Wordsworth revised these lines he called the written book ‘exposed and lifeless’,164 just as in the ‘juvenile’ Phaedrus, Socrates declares that a written work can never do more than remind the reader of what he already knows. It seems further significant that the provenance of Imagination, or the Idea, is uncertain, in that it is encountered simply ‘rising up’. Indeed, Wordsworth’s revisions of these lines have sparked an irresolvable critical debate about when, temporally, Imagination is supposed to appear, whether at the time of the Alp-crossing experience, or at the time of writing.165 Wordsworth’s moment of breaking through the darkness can be read as corresponding to the eventual utterance of the inwardly working Idea. The mechanism of blockage and release is a key component of the sublime for both Wordsworth and Coleridge.166

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Coleridge does not quote from Plato himself to establish that he ‘taught the idea’, or that ‘the grand idea of the universe worked in him before it found utterance’. Rather he pursues Plato’s afterlives, connecting ‘Platonic idea[s], with the fine arts’, especially in the Renaissance.167 Coleridge seems to find more of the original sublimity of the Idea in those works of art which are powerful in spite of their formlessness, than in the dialogues of Plato which are formed with precision. Coleridge recalls one particular fresco he had seen in Pisa in 1806 (‘The Triumph of Death’), in which ‘from all the laws of drawing, from all the absence of colour (for you saw no colour, if there were any you could not see it, it was gone), it was one mighty idea that spoke to you, everywhere the same’.168 The lack of colour, Coleridge implies, contributes to the sublime effect: a black-and-white scene can possess the requisite formlessness while maintaining unity of tone, as in the Wordsworthian chiaroscuro: ‘light & darkness’.169 At a time when the Elgin Marbles were celebrated for their colourlessness, the association of a grey sublime with the works of the ancient Greek philosopher probably felt natural enough. The mighty Idea in this fresco is the idea of death: the painting depicts different groups of men, men of business, men of pleasure, huntsmen, all f lying in different directions, while the dreadful goddess descending with a kind of air-chilling white with her wings expanded and the extremities of the wings compressed into talons, and the only group in which there appeared anything like welcoming her was a group of beggars.170

Rising into his own mode of sublime discourse, Coleridge appears to have digressed far from his stated topic. Yet there is consistency in this procedure if we think of Coleridge as providing a glimpse into what he regarded as the esoteric Plato — a more appropriate glimpse for the lecture-audience than abstruse speculations on the metaphysics of Speusippus. It should be noted that the comparisons I have drawn with Wordsworth would certainly have been repudiated by Wordsworth himself. Robinson records an awkward dialogue between Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1817, in which ‘Coleridge spoke of painting in that style of mysticism which is now his habit of feeling. Wordsworth met this by dry, unfeeling contradiction’.171 Nevertheless, the comparison is the more substantial given that Coleridge now begins to speak of paintings as though they were composed in words — emphasizing that the great legacy of Plato is the symbol. The following description would more obviously fit poems than paintings: In other [Italian Renaissance] pictures the presence of an idea acting, of that which was not formed, was evident, because the forms there outraged all notions of that which was to be impressed had there not been something more; but it was the adoption of a symbol, which, though not in as polished a language as could be wished for, which though in a hoarser voice and less tempered modulation uttered the same words to that mind which is the source of all that we really enjoy or that is worth enjoying.172

Despite wishing for a ‘more polished language’ in these pictures, Coleridge implies that if it were more polished, it might no longer be symbolic. As often, the point is to escape the despotism of the eye: if the eye rests satisfied with an image (or

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merely rejects it uninterestedly) it cannot be truly symbolic. The symbol points to the invisible, to the Idea of which it is only a part. From these references to ‘voice’ and ‘modulation’ Coleridge moves into a brief discussion of music, which suits his purpose in being an entirely non-visual art: ‘for it is as far as sight is concerned formless and yet contains the principles of form’. Coleridge declares: ‘If we sink into music our childhood comes back [, with all its hopes, and all its obscure reminiscences]’.173 Coleridge is presumably offering the notion of reminiscence as Platonic here, ‘childhood’ evoking the early, naively (in Schiller’s sense) incoherent wonder of the philosopher. Jackson comments that Coleridge does not usually discuss music in these terms,174 which is true, but given the extent to which Coleridge has made Plato in his own image, his auditors might have recalled the tantalizing effort of musical recollection in ‘Kubla Khan’: ‘Could I revive within me | Her symphony and song [. . .]’. In the lengthy and complex final sentence of the lecture — which evidently tested the beleaguered shorthand reporter — Coleridge speaks further of the ‘craving for something higher than what could be imagined in form’, and brings the temporal sweep of Plato’s inf luence back to the most momentous event of all, the coming of Christ. This spirit, or noble craving, instilled by Plato, prepared the ancients to be more and more dissatisfied with religion which presented nothing but forms the symbols of which were to be found either in crude [physiological] speculations [or] moral vices [which] still led them to look first to a purer ideal with a desire of connecting with it, which is equally taught by Plato, reality, and which Plato himself, or at least Socrates, told us could only be done by the Realiser, by Him who was the fountain of all and in the substance superseded the shadow, I mean the Christian religion.175

The lecturer seems to be enacting his subject, the tendency of genius actuated by an Idea to produce only semi-coherence, but striving to hint at the heights of mental aspiration. In alluding to the Republic’s description of the just man who will have to suffer crucifixion,176 Coleridge finally ties together Socrates and Plato as anticipators of Christ. It appeared that Coleridge was offering the final section of Lecture Four as a retreat from speculation about the content of Plato’s esoteric doctrine into a mere tracing of the tangible historical inf luence of Platonism, Renaissance art being the most convincing of the ‘facts’ that can be adduced to prove this inf luence.177 He deferred the speculation about the esoteric to a consideration of the doctrines of Speusippus and later Platonists — such a deferral being a typical move of Coleridge’s own public utterances, as in chapter thirteen of the Biographia. Yet despite this overt deferral, he then intimates that it is after all imaginative creation, manifested in symbolic art, which gives us the closest possible access to the Idea taught esoterically by Plato. This thought, though expressed indirectly as befits Coleridge’s declarations to the public, keeps open the possibility of a more sensitive interpretation of the Platonic esoterica than does Tennemann’s contention that Plato effectively kept a whole network of propositions behind closed doors.

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Notes to Chapter 4 1. See Kathleen Coburn, In Pursuit of Coleridge (London: Bodley Head, 1977), pp. 37–48. 2. Phil. Lects. ii, 588; Bate, Coleridge, pp. 180–81. 3. Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel, pp. 108–20. 4. See Phil Lects. i, cxl; and pp. 36–38, above. 5. Phil. Lects. i, 4; xli. Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy, 3rd edn (London, 1701) — henceforth: Stanley. On Enfield and Brucker, see p. 16, above. 6. Coleridge called Enfield’s version ‘a mere Bookseller’s Job Abridgement’, and thought Brucker himself ‘a man of great Learning & unwearied industry, but scantily gifted with the true philosophic insight’ (CL iv, 589); he preferred Tennemann to Brucker (CN iv, 5121). 7. Phil. Lects. i, 303–06; on Gibbon cf. pp. 16–17, above. 8. Phil. Lects. ii, 605. 9. Phil. Lects. ii, 874. 10. Phil. Lects. i, 300. 11. The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn (London and New York: Pilot Press, 1949), p. 61. 12. Phil. Lects. i, 443. 13. Phil. Lects. i, 160–61. 14. BL i, 204. He had used the word previously, in Lects. 1795. Appropriately, the word ‘esoterical’ is first recorded as used of Coleridge, (OED, citing Leigh Hunt, Autobiography (1850; 1860, i, iii, 128)): ‘This was [Coleridge’s] esoterical opinion of him.’ 15. Stanley, pp. 371–72. 16. CM v, 744. 17. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ii, 26. 18. CM v, 743. 19. CM v, 753. 20. CM v, 715. 21. CN iv, 4649, quoted in Phil. Lects. ii, 530 n. 70; cf. Republic 509d–511e. 22. Friend, i, 419. 23. Phil. Lects. i, 295; cf. the ‘Prospectus’ (p. 4). 24. Phil. Lects. i, 225; on Providence, pp. 209–10. As S. V. Pradhan suggests, there is not necessarily a contradiction here, since in Coleridge’s view ‘the few’ are the instruments of the universal Reason: ‘The Historiographer of Reason: Coleridge’s Philosophy of History’, Studies in Romanticism, 25.1 (1986), 39–62 (pp. 60–61). 25. Phil. Lects. i, 173. 26. Phil. Lects. i, 184. Cf. ‘Plato’s works are logical exercises for the mind; nothing positive is advanced. Socrates may be fairly represented in the moral parts, but in the metaphysical disqui­sitions it is Pythagoras. Xenophon is quite different’ (TT i, 56). This was a commonplace, e.g. Proclus wrote that Plato ‘mingled the Pythagoric and Socratic peculiarity’: Pythagoric inspiration, elevation of conception, and mystical or symbolic indications; Socratic ‘philanthropy, the sociable, the mild [. . .] the ethical’. (Commentary on the ‘Timaeus’, trans. by Taylor, TTS xv, 17.) 27. Phil. Lects. i, 183. 28. Phil. Lects. i, 282. 29. Phil. Lects. ii, 584. 30. Phil. Lects. i, 445 and n.; Friend, i, 129–32. 31. Phil. Lects. i, 197. 32. Phil. Lects. i, 183. 33. Phil. Lects. i, 304; cf. 326, 332. 34. Phil. Lects. i, 295. 35. Phil. Lects. ii, 479. 36. Phil. Lects. i, 400. 37. SWF i, 685. 38. Frank E. Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1965), p. 5.

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39. As Richard Holmes suggests, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 462. For Coleridge’s enthusiasm on reading Vico in 1825 see CL v, 454, and Fisch, ‘The Coleridges, Dr. Prati, and Vico’. On his use of Vico’s historical theories, see Edoardo Zuccato, Coleridge in Italy (Dublin: Cork University Press, 1996), pp. 138–44; Davidson, Coleridge’s Career, pp. 240–43. 40. Phil. Lects. i, 184. 41. Phil. Lects. i, 49–50. 42. Phil. Lects. i, 49. 43. Phil. Lects. i, 57. 44. Phil. Lects. i, 26; 33; 59–63; lxxvii. 45. Phil. Lects. i, 72, 80. 46. Phil. Lects. i, 117; cf. lxxxv. Tennemann, i, 138; quoted (omitting italics) in Phil. Lects. 117 (n. 26). 47. Phil. Lects. i, 111. 48. Phil. Lects. i, 122. 49. Phil. Lects. i, 134–35. 50. Phil. Lects. i, 136–40. 51. Phil. Lects. i, 140–41. The standard history of Greece, which Coleridge used, William Mitford, The History of Greece, 8 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1814), portrays Athenian democracy very negatively, as George Grote was to object in his great history of Greece. Mitford writes of Socrates’ condemnation ‘under the jealous tyranny of the Athenian democracy’ (V, 149). On Coleridge’s respectful but critical attitude toward Mitford, see Phil. Lects. i, lxvii. 52. Phil. Lects. i, 133. 53. Phil. Lects. i, 142. 54. LL i, 574; cf. BL ii, 82 n. 2, where several similar passages are gathered. 55. Phil. Lects. i, 141–42. In this account of Socrates’ instinctive wisdom it might be possible to hear echoes of the Unitarian enthusiasm for Socrates (cf. pp. 19–21, above). 56. CL ii, 810. 57. Phil. Lects. i, 142. 58. Phil. Lects. i, 229. 59. Phil. Lects. i, 183. 60. Prelude, Book II, lines 334–41. Unless otherwise stated, references to the Prelude are to the AB-Stage text presented in The Thirteen-Book ‘Prelude’, ed. by Mark L. Reed, 2 vols (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). 61. Prelude, Book VI, line 542. 62. Republic 505e. 63. See Michael Franz, Schellings Tübingen Platon-Studien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), p. 66. 64. Hedley, p. 33. For a full account, see E. N. Tigerstedt, The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1974). 65. ‘Neo-platonist’ (p. 161); cf. ‘new Platonists’ (p. 192). OED’s first record of ‘Neoplatonism’ is incidentally from the English translation of Tennemann that appeared in 1832. 66. Cf. Christopher Asmuth, Interpretation — Transformation: Das Platonbild bei Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher und Schopenhauer und das Legitimationsproblem der Philosophiegeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), p. 13. 67. Phil. Lects. i, 192. ‘Die Einleitung zur Übersetzung des Platon’, in Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleier­m acher, Über die Philosophie Platons, ed. by Peter M. Steiner (Hamburg: Meiner, 1996), pp. 79–87; trans. by William Dobson as Schleiermacher’s Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato (Cambridge and London, 1836), pp. 59–68. For commentary, see Julia A. Lamm, ‘The Art of Interpreting Plato’, in The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher, ed. by Jacqueline Mariňa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 91–108 (p. 98); and Asmuth, pp. 187–244. See further Douglas Hedley, ‘Was Schleiermacher a Christian Platonist?’, Dionysius, 17 (December 1999), 149–68, esp. pp. 159–60. 68. Coburn, ed., Philosophical Lectures, p. 411. 69. See Phil. Lects. i, 192 n. 51.

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70. Tigerstedt, Decline, p. 70. 71. Tigerstedt (Decline, pp. 64–68) describes this convincingly, but he dislikes the ‘esoteric’ approach to Plato per se. For a concise defence, see Giovanni Reale, History of Ancient Philosophy, ii: Plato and Aristotle, ed. and trans. by John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). For a summary of the complex tradition, extending through Ficino, regarding Plato’s esoteric teaching on the nature of the Good: cf. Hermann Steintahl, ‘Ungeschriebene Lehre’, in Platon-Lexikon: Begriffswörterbuch zu Platon und der Platonischen Tradition, ed. by Christian Schäfer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007), pp. 291–96. 72. Tennemann, ii, 203. 73. Phil. Lects. i, 187–90. 74. Sydenham’s scheme derives from the classification of the dialogues in Diogenes Laertius, quoted in Stanley, pp. 184–85. Schleiermacher rejected such classifications as totally unmethodical (Über die Philosophie Platons, p. 43). Coleridge’s mention of ‘Fischer/Foster’ in his notes (Phil. Lects. i, 201) is not necessarily a mistake about Floyer Sydenham’s name (as Jackson suggests, n. 7): Fischer and Foster were both eighteenth-century editors of Plato, and in a work such as Platonis Euthyphro Apologia Socratis Crito Phaedo, ed. Ioh. Frider. Fischerus, 3rd edn (Leipzig, 1783), Coleridge could have found much critical information together with Diogenes Laertius’ ‘Life of Plato’ and an exposition of the traditional arrangement of tetralogies. This might suggest that he was deriving material on Plato from further sources besides Tennemann, Stanley, and the Bipont edition of Plato. 75. Phil. Lects. i, 190 and n.47, which points out Coleridge’s recommendation of the order in which Plato’s ‘most important’ dialogues should be read: Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Symposium, Parmenides, Timaeus, Laws, Republic (LS, p. 172n.); a similar list in 1826 omits Theaetetus, Sym­ posium, and Timaeus (CN iv, 5436). 76. Phil. Lects. i, lvii–lviii. 77. Phil. Lects. i, 186. 78. Phil. Lects. i, 189, 216. 79. Phil. Lects. i, 189. 80. Phil. Lects. i, 189. 81. Logic, pp. 139–40. In Lecture Five, Coleridge also uses the image of the soul’s wings, echoing Deuteronomy 32. 11 or Phaedrus 246e (which Coleridge cites in CN iv, 4979): the dialogues are preparatory, predisciplinary, tending to kindle the desire for the philosophy itself in the few minds thereto called, tending to remove the obstacles and most fitting to foster the growth of the wings of such minds, f luttering as it were on the edge of the eagle’s nest. (Phil. Lects. i, 216) Coleridge seems to have studied the Phaedrus relatively early: see CN i, 1002, 1004. 82. ‘Plato’s works are preparatory exercises of the mind. He leads the mind to see that contradictory propositions are each true — which therefore must belong to a higher Logic — that of Ideas. They are contradictory only in the Aristotelian Logic’ (TT i, 98); ‘Plato discovered the insufficiency of the Understanding indirectly, by contradictions’ (CN v, 5495). 83. CN v, 5554. 84. Shorey, lecture published in Platonism Ancient and Modern (California: California University Press, 1938), pp. 224–25. 85. Phil. Lects. i, 185. 86. The precise source for the sentence just quoted seems to be not that (mis)quoted in Phil. Lects. i, 185 n. 38: ‘Er hatte nehmlich eine geheime Philosophie, welche nicht für das große Publikum bestimmt war, so wie sein Schüler Aristoteles eine esoterische und exoterische Philosophie’ (Tennemann ii, 205); but rather a few pages later: ‘Die geheime Philosophie, welche für manche so viel Anstössiges hat, ist also nichts anders, als eine esoterische, oder mit andern Worten wissen­ schaftliche Philosophie, in Gegensatz der populären’ (Tennemann ii, 220). Coleridge further used this section of Tennemann in The Friend (I, 461): see pp. 132–33, below. 87. Tennemann ii, 207. 88. Phil. Lects. i, 185.

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89. Tennemann ii, 207–14. 90. Tennemann ii, 214. 91. In this paragraph I am summarizing Reale, History, pp. 16–17. 92. Tennemann ii, 216. 93. Tennemann ii, 214. 94. Phil. Lects. i, 185. 95. Tennemann ii, 217–20; Coleridge does, however, take up this section in Friend i, 461; see pp. ??, below. 96. Phil. Lects. i, 214. 97. CN iii, 3934, quoted and discussed in Chapter 1, above. 98. CM v, 742. Tennemann iii, 9n. 99. Phil. Lects. i, 215 and n. 16. 100. Phil. Lects. i, 217. 101. Phil. Lects. i, 197. 102. Phil. Lects. i, 218–36. 103. Phil. Lects. i, 282–83. 104. Phil. Lects. i, 283–85. 105. Phil. Lects. i, 284. Cf. Crabb Robinson’s diary entry in 1810: ‘Of Jesus Christ he asserted that he was a Platonic philosopher’: Diary i, 307–08, reprinted in Coleridge: Interviews, p. 132. 106. CN III, 3934, discussed in Chapter 1, above. 107. Tennemann vi, 194. 108. CM v, 226. 109. Phil. Lects. i, 192. 110. CM v, 229. Again, dismissing Iamblichus’ claim (reported by Stanley) that Pythagoras visited Thales at Miletus before he was eighteen, Coleridge exclaims: Once for all, it may be observed, that of all the Successors of Plotinus, the best of whom bear a striking resemblance to small Potatoes — (i.e. they are no great things) Iamblichus is the very worst. So far from meriting any reliance on his authority, he discredits every fact by attesting it. (CM v, 224) 111. CM v, 228. 112. It is possible to imagine from Tennemann’s willingness in such cases to give the benefit of the doubt why Coleridge wrote of ‘the good liking, I bear to Tennemann’ (CM v, 813). Tennemann is probably reacting to Brucker who, following Mosheim (translator and critic of Cudworth), called all the successors of Ammonius Saccas including Plotinus madmen, liars, impostors, vain and foolish forgers of a detestable and false philosophy (Historia critica philosophiae, ii, 229 f., 257 f., 260 f., 319 f. — cited in Tigerstedt, Decline, p. 58 and n. 452). 113. Tennemann vi, iii. 114. See pp. 54–56, above. 115. Tennemann vi, 16. 116. CM v, 728; see further Phil. Lects. i, lx-lxiii. 117. Arthur Johnson, Manual of the History of Philosophy (Oxford: Talboys, 1832), introduction. This is a bad translation of Tennemann’s Grundriß der Geschichte der Philosophie (Leipzig: Barth, 1820), perhaps reliant on Victor Cousin’s then-famous French translation. 118. CM v, 750. 119. Tennemann ii, 265; CM v, 729. 120. CM v, 753. 121. CM v, 692; cf. 813. 122. Franz, pp. 91–98. 123. Tennemann vi, 43–44. 124. Tennemann vi, 44–45. (CM v, 750–51 quotes this passage partially and inaccurately, also mis­ translating ‘abgerechnet’ (‘apart from’, in this context) as ‘having discarded’, thus distorting the meaning.) ‘Das realste Wesen’ is what Tennemann elsewhere refers to as ‘das Wesen der Wesen [. . .] das vollkommenste Wesen’, i.e. that which Plato names ‘the Good’ in Republic VI (Tennemann ii, 217, and pp. 151, below).

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125. Tennemann vi, 46. 126. OED credits Coleridge with coining the word ‘Super-sensuous’ (Friend, i, 156). 127. CM v, 750. 128. CN III, 3802. Coburn’s note quotes the marginalia to Tennemann, as does Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, p. 178. 129. CM v, 750–51. 130. CM v, 751. 131. CM v, 752. 132. Ibid. 133. Ibid. 134. CM v, 755. 135. CM v, 756. 136. CM v, 757; cf. 743. 137. CM v, 776. 138. CM v, 756. 139. This was nevertheless fairly standard polemical procedure at the time. Franz Berg condemns Schelling as essentially identical with Plotinus in his rash assertion of an ‘Absolute’; Berg prefers Plato, who supposedly avoided such excess: Sextus oder über die absolute Erkenntniß von Schelling: Ein Gespräch (Würzburg: Sartorius, 1804), esp. pp. 74–75. 140. CM v, 743. 141. The line is in an early draft of ‘The Leech-gatherer’ and defended in Wordsworth’s letter to Sara Hutchinson, 14 June 1802. 142. BL i, 156. M. Jadwiga Swiatecka’s elucidation of the Coleridgean symbol emphasizes ‘that a symbol has the same genesis as an Idea, but is its outward, sensible complement’: The Idea of the Symbol: Some Nineteenth Century Comparisons with Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 44. Cf. Barfield’s comments in Phil. Lects. ii, 876–77. 143. LS, p. 30. 144. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’ (1825), SWF ii, 1251–1301; e.g. p. 1264. Cf. Phil. Lects. i, 54, 120. 145. The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by H. N. Coleridge, 4 vols (London, 1836–39), ii, 179, quoted in Phil. Lects. i, 190 (n.48). Coleridge continues with a perspicuous criticism: But there is this sophism in it, that it is forgotten that the human faculties, indeed, are parts and not separate things; but that you could never get chiefs who were wholly reason, ministers who were wholly understanding, soldiers all wrath, labourers all concupiscence, and so on through the rest. 146. Phil. Lects. i, 190. 147. Phil. Lects. i, 193. 148. Phil. Lects. i, 193. 149. Orsini (p. 43) castigates Coleridge for sometimes stating that Plato’s Ideas are the thoughts of God, i.e. intradeical (he cites CL ii, 1195, and the present passage is another example), and being ‘behind the times’ for not knowing Brucker’s strong argument that Plato himself held the Ideas to be extradeical, in Historia philosophica doctrinae de ideis (Augsburg, 1723). In fact this argument is summarized in a work to which Coleridge did refer, Enfield’s abridged translation of Brucker’s larger history of philosophy (1819 edition, pp. 233–35). It seems odd, nevertheless, to blame Coleridge for this given the extreme historical complexity of the question (drastically summarized in Harry A. Wolfson, ‘Extradeical and Intradeical Interpretations of Platonic Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 22.1 (1961), 3–32) and the fact that Philo, a considerable authority in Coleridge’s eyes, taught the intradeical, ‘thoughts of God’ version. 150. BL i, 304; De Paolo, p. 95. 151. Phil. Lects. i, 194. 152. This sentence seems beyond repair: Jackson emends it thus without explanation, but Coburn notes that the reporter wrote ‘close on my natural variety’, and follows E. H. Coleridge’s emendation ‘clothe my natural humanity’ (Coburn, ed., Philosophical Lectures, p. 166). 153. Phil. Lects. i, 194.

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154. BL ii, 15–16. 155. Phil. Lects. i, 194. 156. BL i, 301. 157. Phil. Lects. i, 194. 158. Phil. Lects. i, 162; cf. the Frere manuscript, Phil. Lects. ii, 690. 159. Coleridge makes this connection explicitly in a later lecture, Phil. Lects. ii, 484. 160. CN i, 528, discussed in chapter 1 above; on inspiration, pp. 74–82, above. 161. Phil. Lects. i, 194. 162. Prelude Book I, lines 500–02; 419–21. 163. Draft of April 1804, transcribed in Duncan Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 219–20; a facsimile is printed in The Thirteen-Book Prelude, i, 356–61. 164. Prelude, Book VIII, line 727. 165. See the note in The Fourteen-Book ‘Prelude’, ed. by W. J. B. Owen (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 129. 166. Cf. Neil Herz, ‘The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime’, in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ed. by Geoffrey H. Hartman (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 62–85. 167. Phil. Lects. i, 194. Towards the end of lecture 5 too, Coleridge makes a similar move to Renaissance art: Phil. Lects. i, 237. 168. Phil. Lects. i, 195. 169. De Quincey, ever hungry for the sublime, especially admired the light-dark effects of Wordsworth’s poetry: ‘On Wordsworth’s Poetry’, Tait’s Magazine (September 1845), 545–54, reprinted in Works, XV, 223–42, esp. pp. 228–29. 170. Phil. Lects. i, 195; see also n.62 on Coleridge’s encounter with this painting. 171. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. by Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1938), i, 214 (27 December 1817). 172. Phil. Lects. i, 196. 173. Phil. Lects. i, 196; the material in square brackets is from Coleridge’s notes, transcribed p. 202. 174. Ibid., n. 63. 175. Phil. Lects. i, 197. 176. Republic 361–62 (noted by Jackson in Phil. Lects. i, 197, n. 64, using Shorey’s translation). 177. Phil. Lects. i, 194.

Chapter 5

v

Restoring Plato’s ‘System’ The Friend and the Opus Maximum There is a reticence about Coleridge’s published works, which one discovers from his private conversations, that is very painful, as causing mistrust and a constant doubt whether he does not mean much more than he says. F. D. Maurice 1

Closely related to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy are the historical sections of the ‘Essays on the Principles of Method’ in the 1818 Friend. The Essays on Method propose a Platonic method for science and philosophy by which investigation proceeds from an ‘initiative IDEA’, in opposition to the modern materialistic procedure from empirical observation. To establish his position Coleridge looks back to Plato and rejects the ‘pretended originality’ of modern empirically based philosophy, arguing that Plato had already confuted the latter with his arguments against the Sophists. Rather than press this point fully, Coleridge advertises his philosophical Lectures in a footnote: the final lecture projected by the advertisement would be on the pre-anticipated nature of modern philosophy, ‘the successive reappearance of the different [ancient] sects from the restoration of literature to our own times’.2 As I discussed above, this conviction in fact animates the whole lecture series. The third major member of this cluster of works (chronologically after the Biographia Literaria of 1817 and Aids to Reflection of 1825) is the Opus Maximum.3 Unlike The Friend and the philosophical Lectures, the Opus Maximum is not a historical work, but it is clearly part of the same overarching endeavour: as McFarland says, ‘Philosophical Lectures establishes much the same position in ref lecting upon philosophical history that the Opus Maximum attempts to do by formal argument’.4 A common feature of all three texts is the appeal to Plato as Coleridge’s most authoritative predecessor. In this chapter, while keeping in mind the close relationship the philosophical Lectures bear to the Opus Maximum and Friend, I wish to discuss the latter two texts as a pair parallel to the pairing of philosophical Lectures and Tennemann marginalia discussed in my previous chapter. In the esoteric marginalia Coleridge develops his treatment of themes he could only touch on in the exoteric lectures. Similarly the esoteric Opus Maximum, which was written for the eyes of a few Coleridgean initiates, develops the exoteric Essays on Method and comes close to fulfilling the ideals of philosophical writing articulated in The Friend as a whole. I argue that in The Friend, the two sets of essays ‘On the Communication of Truth’ and ‘Method’ taken together indicate an ideal of perfectly connected philosophical discourse

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which would result in a ‘system’ — precisely in Plato’s lost esoteric system — and exclude poetry. But Coleridge’s anxiety of reception meant that he could not seriously pursue this ideal in The Friend: writing for a relatively popular audience he could not dispense with ‘the sweet Baits of literature’. Instead it is in the Opus Maximum that philosophy very nearly triumphs finally over poetry. There, free from the anxiety of reception, Coleridge at last writes in long chains of logical argument, producing the most conceptually and syntactically difficult of all his formal works. As in the Essays on Method, but more convincingly, his aim is to discover a Ground, the ultimate initiative Idea: this is Will, which forms the basis of Coleridge’s Trinitarianism. Yet a special kind of language is required to communicate an Idea: a non-demonstrative language, since Coleridge insists that by definition what is first cannot be referred back to something prior. The sublime realization that Ideas are indemonstrable is communicable only through art. The Opus Maximum is puritanical in its literary taste; but just as in the lecture on Plato the esoteric philosophy turns out to be best represented by the most sublime of the fine arts rather than by a hypothetical system, so the Opus employs a sublime, rhetorically intense discourse in place of a full network of propositions — and looks to Milton as a model for a Platonic poet. The Friend: The Ideal of Methodical Writing The lengthy political section of The Friend is framed by two series of essays, ‘On the Communication of Truth’ and ‘On the Principles of Method’. The Essays on Method seek the Ground, or Initiative Idea, of scientific inquiry as pursued by Plato and Bacon, and claim to find it in the ‘I AM IN THAT I AM’ of Exodus 3:14. But the peculiar manner in which Coleridge explains this idea is conditioned by his general notions about how truth should be communicated, and so it is useful first to consider the earlier group of essays. The anxiety of reception is manifest from the very beginning of The Friend, when the Fable of the Maddening Rain articulates, in Jerome Christensen’s words, ‘the overt doubt that the proper means can be found by which to communicate that which is not accommodated to the understanding of an audience — that for which it has no images and no remembered sensations’.5 Coleridge intends to counter the prevalent despotism of the eye with true religion, which he later defines as ‘the act and habit of reverencing THE INVISIBLE’6 — yet he openly questions readers’ willingness and capacity to follow him in these investigations. This was not merely a rhetorical introduction to the work: in private too Coleridge later continued to ref lect that ‘Great indeed are the difficulties of a true philosophy, not merely those of attaining truth or the intellectual vision [. . .] but the difficulties of communicating the truth when attained’.7 This is a further instance of Coleridge’s fear of substituting paper promises for gold and silver. Coleridge’s principle for the communication of truth is that a writer or speaker must intend to communicate ‘an adequate notion of the thing spoken of, when this is practicable’, and when not practicable, ‘at all events a right notion, or none at all’.8 This is a Platonic distinction: Socrates, before investigating justice in Republic (331c), tells Cephalus:

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Every one would somehow own, that if a man should receive arms from his friend who was of a sound mind, it would not be proper to restore such things if he should demand them when mad; nor would the receiver be just: nor again would he be just, who, to a man in such a condition, should willingly tell all the truth.

In Coleridge’s view, it may be impracticable to convey an adequate notion because ‘unfit auditors’, those not habituated to the reception of truth, necessarily misunderstand truth nakedly presented. Worse, mere verbal truth (a notion that evokes the biblical opposition between letter and spirit) can therefore produce an effect of ‘dangerous falsehood’ when addressed to the wrong audience.9 Most contemporary writing, Coleridge believes, is addressed to the wrong audience, that is to the abstract ‘reading public’.10 Coleridge regards this anonymous public as a lowest common denominator: periodicals which aim to amuse the ‘public’ actually have the effect of ever further reducing readers’ capacity for thinking. The fashionable periodical style, claims Coleridge, is inadequate to the communication of truth. This popular style is French (a prejudice Coleridge always retained), epigrammatic, ‘asthmatic’ because of its short sentences. Its ‘brisk and breathless periods’ offer momentary entertainment and f lattery to the consumer, but enervate the soul. By opposition, Coleridge defines his own style: it is modelled on seventeenth-century English writers such as Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and Taylor, whose ‘stately’ architectural prose with its ‘difficult evolutions’ demands a thoughtful, attentive response.11 The contrast here resembles that drawn in Gorgias, in which Socrates compares true justice with medicine, and vulgar rhetoric with cookery — the latter being designed only to f latter the body, not to cure it.12 Coleridge’s argument is a prime example of the ‘anxiety of reception’ — an anxiety of which he was conscious.13 He despises and fears the undiscriminating reading public, and feels morally obliged to ‘guard against the herd of promiscuous readers’.14 This defensiveness informs the peculiar twofold function of The Friend’s foundational essays. On the one hand, Coleridge attempts to encourage fit readers though few to trust in his sincerity as an intellectual guide. On the other, he tries actively to deter unfit readers from going on. This balancing-act results in a browbeating tone: Coleridge demands ‘thought and attention’ from the reader, refutes the charge of arrogance that might be made against him, and repeatedly protests his own sincerity.15 The concept of sincerity, indeed, is involved in Coleridge’s ideal of a connected prose style: he told a correspondent, ‘I must write to you in sincerity — i.e. sine cerâ, without wax, entire, unrivetted’.16 However, according to his own principle, Coleridge cannot write an exoteric work such as The Friend entire, unrivetted, connectedly: to do so would not in fact be sincere, given the author’s awareness that the truths thus communicated would be dangerously misunderstood by the majority. Hence Coleridge modifies his praise of the seventeenth-century style, admitting that it is not really suitable for a modern periodical.17 Coleridge goes on to translate from Simon Grynaeus’s preface to Ficino’s translation of Plato: In very truth, it grieveth me that men, those especially who profess themselves to be Christians, should be so taken with the sweet Baits of Literature that they

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Coleridge cites this as part of his ‘bill of fare’ — a phrase that ref lects an anxious awareness that his work will be (or worse, may not be) bought and consumed. The implication is that The Friend, pursuing a scholarly, connected discourse, will abstain from the ‘sweet Baits of literature’ (a phrase that derives ultimately from Timaeus).19 Certainly Coleridge assiduously avoids ‘low and sensual’ topics. And yet the elegant and curious quotation of Grynaeus itself embodies Coleridge’s real policy throughout The Friend, which is to make as much use of the sweet baits of literature as possible. Not that this is exactly contradictory: as Coleridge goes on to say, ‘my very system compels me to make every fair appeal to the feelings, the imagination and even the fancy. If these are to be withheld from the service of truth, virtue, and happiness, to what purpose were they given?’20 However, it does ref lect the limits of an exoteric work, written under the anxiety of reception. To state the contrast plainly: in ‘On the Communication of Truth’ Coleridge advertises a severe, logically connected and philosophically difficult work. Yet The Friend has very few passages of dense argument and is everywhere punctuated by elegant quotations, and ‘Landing-Places’ designed to instruct whilst amusing. Linked with the declared policy of quoting extensively is Coleridge’s tendency to quote ‘authorities’ in lieu of the lengthy reasoning which would be required to prove a particular point. Coleridge later explicitly defends this policy — appropriately enough by quoting (from an unidentified ‘Stapylton’): ‘ “A great authority may be a poor proof, but it is an excellent presumption” ’, whilst anxiously acknowledging that it is reprehensible ‘to offer or receive names in lieu of sound arguments’.21 This sustained reliance on quotation and authority is consistent with Coleridge’s anxiety about the communication of truth to an unknown and undisciplined audience, and it results in some bravura essays and finely chosen quotations. But in some cases it also results in confusion: in particular, it makes the Essays on Method — brilliant and innovative though they are in places — eccentrically unmethodical. Stirling’s sneer at Coleridge’s eclectic opportunism in his philosophical writing was clearly made with The Friend in mind: ‘One could read in Plato and Bacon, and all the rest of them; and one could quote passages from them that spoke for themselves’.22 Cheaply dismissive though this is, the mixture of historical background, a priori argument, and quotation of ‘authorities’ in the Essays on Method is not entirely happy. In the following review of the Essays on Method I argue that (i) Coleridge’s reliance on Plato as an ‘authority’, though conceptually appropriate, enables him to avoid developing ideas about Will on the basis that they are esoteric; (ii) without these esoteric ideas, Coleridge’s investigation of the ‘ground’ lacks argumentative clarity, but there is (so to speak) compensation in his poetic articulation of the Platonic notion of anamnesis; (iii) Coleridge’s final essay is uneven: poetically, he develops the notion of anamnesis, but philosophically his dogmatic assertions that the ‘ground of all being’ lies in the ‘I AM IN THAT I AM’ have little to do with ‘method’. I then compare Coleridge’s much more convincing parallel account in the Opus Maximum.23

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The Authority of Plato in the Essays on Method By his painstaking analysis of how truth should be communicated to a particular audience, and disavowal of financial motives for writing, Coleridge distances himself vehemently from what he labels ‘sophistry’: the use of language in the service of monetary gain rather than Truth. Coleridge looks to the authority of Plato for his anti-sophistic project, and throughout Section Two (i.e. mainly the ‘Essays on the Principles of Method’) identifies himself as a modern Plato struggling with conditions comparable to those that confronted his predecessor, whilst attempting to mediate the same timeless Truth. The claiming of Plato’s authority is most explicit in the epigraph to the Essays on Method. This is a quotation from Plato’s Second Letter, to the effect that the recipient should trust whichever philosophy and whichever teacher he thinks best — but that if Plato’s philosophy is the most satisfying, he should honour Plato above all other teachers.24 The use of this quotation signals the centrality of Plato to the principles of Coleridgean Method, and ambitiously claims, by implication, the same level of conditional deference from his reader as Plato claims from his correspondent: Coleridge is boldly identifying himself as a contemporary Plato. Coleridge is justified in taking Plato for his model in the sense that ‘Method’ does have an impeccably Platonic provenance. In his preliminary definition of method as literally (by its Greek etymology) ‘a way, or path of Transit’, implying a ‘progressive transition’, Coleridge mentions Socrates’ discourse with the slave in Meno.25 Though this reference is only an aside, it is apt, given that Plato was the first to use the word μεθόδος as a technical term,26 and the concept pervades his dialogues, from Meno to the mathematical discussion in the Republic, and the praise of method as ‘the gift of some Prometheus’ in Philebus.27 The locus classicus for later discussions was the discussion of rhetoric in Phaedrus, where Socrates uses the example of Hippocrates who learned and could teach the pre-eminently useful art of medicine because he followed an appropriate method.28 Gilbert comments that: This passage contains the germ of the idea which later was to prove so pervasive, namely, that there is a method in the acquiring of a useful art which can be applied to all of the useful arts because it sets up criteria to govern the activities of the investigator who wishes to establish an art.29

This notion survives into Coleridge’s polymathic presentation. One of Coleridge’s claims, indeed, is that a single ‘Method’ unites great thinkers as diverse as Plato and Bacon. The three essays preceding the Essays on Method make a historical argument by anticipation (so to speak) against sophistry ancient and modern, and thus set up the ethical imperative behind Coleridge’s concept of Method. Essay II attacks the ‘spirit of Epicureanism in the higher ranks’ of early nineteenth-century (English) society; Epicureanism expressing for Coleridge the morality of prudent self-love as opposed to ‘the true speculative philosophy’ for which the good Will is the only unconditional good. The rise of Epicureanism goes hand in hand with sensuality — the love of the visible, and neglect of religion which is ‘a reverencing of THE INVISIBLE’. This process was anticipated by the rise of the sophists in Greece,

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who (as Coleridge claims in Essay III) likewise all too successfully separated ethics from faith in the invisible,30 and were eventually exposed by Socrates and Plato. Coleridge is inf luenced in this view by Plato himself, since the account of the Sophists by Tennemann from which he derives his material staunchly repeats Plato’s condemnations of the Sophists.31 Here again, Coleridge identifies himself as a contemporary Plato. He paraphrases at length, for its contemporary relevance, Callicles’ speech in Gorgias on natural right.32 Coleridge uses this to demonstrate that the morality of enlightened self-love results, not in altruism, but rather, pressed to its extreme, in the directing of the Will to seek power at the expense of others. Callicles states that according to natural right, the stronger always has the right to control the weaker. Coleridge notes sharply that with ‘the prevalence of this sophistry’, ‘the pure will is ranked among the means to an alien end’ — implying that that end is, simply, power. Coleridge’s writing has its own remarkable ‘anticipatory’ quality: he here recognizes — and shows as already recognized by Plato — that the polar opposite of the Christian-Kantian doctrine of the categorical imperative and good Will is not in fact the prudential ethics of Paley, but the notion of will to power that would later be developed by Nietzsche. Of Callicles’ speech Coleridge exclaims: ‘It would have been well for mankind, if such had always been the language of sophistry!’ Coleridge’s meaning is that the Paleyan doctrine of enlightened self-love is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, masking Callicles’ principles in more insidious terms.33 The hint is thus already in place that ‘The Grounds of Morality and Religion’ which this section of The Friend is designed to investigate will be found in Will. But Will is, of course, a complex metaphysical topic, territory which for Coleridge is firmly esoteric. His convictions about the ‘communication of truth’ thus lead him to postpone this investigation to the Opus Maximum. ‘To demonstrate the hollowness of the present system’ of prudential ethics and random empiricism, Coleridge writes, ‘is not possible for me without a previous agreement as to the principles of reasoning in general’ — but the attempt to establish such agreement is unsuited to the readers of a periodical.34 A second reason Coleridge gives for curtailing the discussion springs from this anxious concern about readers’ reception of the work. To make his point, Coleridge again turns to the authority of Plato — this time as authority for restricting an exoteric presentation. He translates from the Second Letter: But what a question is this, which you propose, Oh son of Dionysius and Doris! — what is the origin and cause of all evil? But rather is the darkness and travail concerning this, that thorn in the soul which unless a man shall have had removed, never can he partake of truth that is verily and indeed truth.35

The point of this quotation is that the investigation of Will involves the investigation of Original Sin, defined as that corruption of the will with which evil originated; and Coleridge believes that his readers will lack the prior moral and intellectual discipline necessary to the contemplation of ‘an Evil Being, or the Being of Evil, the last and darkest mystery’ (as he was to express it in Aids).36 In fact, however, Coleridge’s just-quoted translation is dubious, since the word ‘κἀκὀς’ in Plato’s text refers not to a metaphysical principle of evil, but rather to the difficulties a

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philosopher experiences in search for the characteristics of the One.37 This slide in meaning is the more striking given that this quotation comes from the passage which Cudworth and other later Christian interpreters read as an anticipation of the doctrine of the Trinity, and which was therefore very familiar to Coleridge. Probably the motivation for Coleridge’s translation ‘the origin [. . .] of all evil’ is to be found in Tennemann’s comment: Aus dem zweiten Briefe erhellet, daß eine Untersuchung über die Φυσις του πρωτου einen Theil seiner geheimen Philosophie ausmachte. Dieses Erste ist nichts anders, als das Wesen der Wesen, welches er in dem sechsten Buche der Republik das vollkommenste Wesen (το αγαθον) nennt. Da er sogleich die Untersuchung über den Grund des Bösen in der Welt anschließt, so kann man daraus nicht ohne Grund schließen, daß er über das Verhältnis der Gottheit zur Welt, und eine Art von Theodicee in seiner geheimen Philosophie vortrug. An einem andern Orte nennt er als Gegenstand derselben die Untersuchung über die letzten und höchsten Principien der Natur (τα ακρα της Φυσεως). Also wohl ohne Zweifel der erste Versuch einer Metaphysik des Uebersinnlichen.38 [It is evident from the Second Letter that an investigation of the ‘nature of the first’ constituted a part of his secret philosophy. This first is nothing other than the essence of essences, which in the sixth book of the Republic he names the most perfect essence (the good). Since he connects as well the investigation of the ground of evil in the world, one can conclude from this that he spoke about the relationship of divinity to the world, and a kind of theodicy in his secret philosophy. Elsewhere he names as the object of this philosophy the investigation of the final and highest principles of nature (the first things of nature). Therefore then without doubt the first attempt at a metaphysic of the supersensuous.]

Tennemann, that is, identifies Plato’s First with the Good, and hence makes the connection between an investigation of the First and an investigation of the prin­ ciple of evil. These investigations are avoided in The Friend, but undertaken in the Opus Maximum; the link provided by Tennemann suggests that Coleridge might have considered his own esoteric work on these subjects to be contributing to a restoration of Plato’s own missing esoterica. Coleridge’s ostentatious avoidance of the topic of the origin of evil is a typical esoteric gesture within an exoteric work, deliberately creating a frustrating sense of mystery and withholding. Rather than discourse on evil, Coleridge takes a step back: Yet that I may fulfil the original scope of the Friend, I shall attempt to provide the preparatory steps for such an investigation in the following Essays on the Principles of Method common to all investigations: which I here present, as the basis of my future philosophical and theological writings, and as the necessary introduction to the same.39

This appears a forecast of the Opus Maximum, and Coleridge retained his sense of the centrality of the Essays on Method to his philosophy; so there is good reason to regard the Opus Maximum as a closely linked endeavour. The authority of Plato as the proponent of an esoteric system is also key to the next stage of Coleridge’s argument. Having stated that to think methodically it

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is necessary to contemplate the ‘relations’ of objects, Coleridge explains the two possible kinds of relation. Essay V deals with the relation of ‘LAW’ — Plato’s territory, where the mind dictates how objects must behave, as in mathematics; and Essay VI with the relation of ‘THEORY’ — Bacon’s territory, where the mind abstracts from empirical observations, as in the natural sciences. On ‘LAW’, Coleridge writes: in whatever science the relation of the parts to each other and to the whole is predetermined by a truth originating in the mind, and not abstracted or generalized from observation of the parts, there we affirm the presence of a law.

The only perfect form of law, however, exists in the Supreme Being, ‘inseparable from the idea of God’.40 Coleridge asserts further: ‘from the contemplation of law in this, its only perfect form, must be derived all true insight into all other grounds and principles necessary to Method, as the science common to all sciences’.41 Only by this activity, which Coleridge wonders whether to call ‘intuition’ or ‘steadfast faith’, can we produce a ‘scientific system’. Coleridge now cites Plato as his main authority for this position. Again, it is a typical manoeuvre of Coleridge’s exoteric writing that rather than ‘enter into the proof of this assertion’ he cites ‘authorities’ for it (whereas in the Opus Maximum he all but dispenses with shorthand authorities in favour of arguing fully, as I explain below).42 He does so by paraphrasing a lengthy passage of Tennemann on the subject of Plato’s esoteric doctrine. The essence of Coleridge’s claim is that, to judge by the testimonies of Aristocles and Aristotle and a cryptic hint from Plato himself, Plato’s esoteric doctrine avowed an ‘intellectual vision’ of ‘things divine’ to be necessary prior to insight into humanity and the objects of nature. In adapting Tennemann’s account to pursue this point, Coleridge now distorts Plato again. Tennemann writes in typically Kantian terms: Aristoteles sagt in seiner Ethik: Plato habe das Problem aufgestellt, ob man in der Philosophie von Principien ausgehen oder auf Principien fort gehen müße, oder mit andern Worten, ob die analytische oder synthetische Methode zu wählen sey? Da sich davon in Platons Schriften nichts findet, so muß Aristoteles dieses entweder aus Platons mündlichem Vortrage, oder aus seinem Leitfaden dazu, (welches eben jene αγραφα δογματα waren) geschöpft haben.43

Coleridge renders this almost exactly, including the ascription to Plato of the ana­ chronistic distinction between synthetic and analytic method: Aristotle [states] in his Ethics, that Plato had discussed the problem, whether in order to scientific ends we must set out from principles, or ascend towards them: in other words, whether the synthetic or analytic be the right method. But as no such question is directly discussed in the published works of the great master, Aristotle must either have received it orally from Plato himself, or have found it in the ἄγραφα δόγματα, the private text books or manuals constructed by his select disciples, and intelligible to these only who like themselves had been entrusted with the esoteric (interior or unveiled) doctrines of Platonism.44

This is the prelude to Coleridge’s apparently outrageous statement:

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The grand problem, the solution of which forms, according to Plato, the final object and distinctive character of philosophy, is this: for all that exists conditionally (i.e. the existence of which is inconceivable except under the condition of its dependency on some other as its antecedent) to find a ground that is unconditional and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system.45

In fact this is Kantian, not Platonic, language — although it is hard and not really necessary to pinpoint an exact source in Kant.46 Kant himself did provide a precedent for this anachronism, when he asserted that Plato (albeit confusedly) con­fronted the question ‘how are synthetic propositions a priori possible?’47 It is possible, however, to draw out some further implications. First, Coleridge was aware that extensive references to Kant would alienate the English readership of that time. Second, the wrong ascription is further evidence that, to Coleridge’s mind, Plato and Kant were effectively identical up to a certain point, including in the aspiration to ‘system’. Third, more negatively, in his eagerness for ‘authorities’, Coleridge was using Tennemann too unquestioningly in this section, despite his recognition of the German historian’s excessive ‘Kantéanism’. Fourth, Coleridge forces his ‘authorities’ into unanimity. Kant is critical of Reason’s natural drive to seek the unconditioned,48 whereas by ascribing this thought to Plato, Coleridge removes the criticism. Searching for the ‘Ground’: Anamnesis The ‘ground that is unconditional and absolute’ is clearly a key concept for ‘Method’, since such a ‘ground’ must be the basis for each methodical investigation. But Coleridge never very clearly answers the question of what this ‘ground’ is — because, I suggest, the answer is involved in his theories of Will and the origin of evil, which form part of his Platonic esoterica not to be explored in a published work. However, the conclusion to Essay V does hint at two compressed answers to this question. The compression — or vagueness — feels unmethodical enough to warrant Coleridge’s ironic self-reproach (in the Biographia) that he has omitted ‘so many links, from the necessity of compression’ as to be confusing;49 but, more positively, it enables Coleridge to play poetically with the concept of anamnesis, as he does in discussing the concept of the a priori.50 Once again Coleridge presents Plato as licensing his rhetorical equivocation over a philosophical demonstration. First, then, Coleridge seems to identify the ‘unconditional ground’ with ‘scientific principles (or laws)’. These are by definition ‘permanent and always the same’, as opposed to the physical world itself which is in constant f lux. Thus these principles, in Coleridge’s unclear phrase, ‘were appropriated to the pure reason, either as its products or as implanted in it’.51 The agent and source of this appropriation are left mysterious. Coleridge appends a footnote on Plato, which may indicate that Coleridge is suggesting that Plato’s theory appropriates the principles to reason; but the footnote is far from clarificatory: Which of these two doctrines was Plato’s own opinion, it is hard to say. In many passages of his works, the latter (i.e. the doctrine of innate, or rather of connate, ideas) seems to be it; but from the character and avowed purpose of these works,

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Restoring Plato’s System as addressed to a promiscuous public, and therefore preparatory and for the discipline of the mind rather than directly doctrinal, it is not improbable that Plato chose it as the more popular representation, and as belonging to the poetic drapery of his Philosophemata.52

In this way Coleridge insinuates Plato’s real, esoteric opinion to be that Reason actively produces scientific principles — but he does not state this directly. In attributing Plato’s reticence to his policy of concealment from the public, Coleridge is preparing his own self-defence via Plato in Essay VII, in which he justifies the ‘labyrinthine’ progress of Plato’s dialogues (and by implication Coleridge’s own work) on the basis of Plato’s maintaining esoteric doctrines: For of Plato’s works, the larger and more valuable portion have all one common end, which comprehends and shines through the particular purpose of each several dialogue; and this is to establish the sources, to evolve the principles, and exemplify the art of METHOD. This is the clue, without which it would be difficult to exculpate the noblest productions of the divine philosopher from the charge of being tortuous and labyrinthine in their progress, and unsatisfactory in their ostensible results.53

Coleridge adds that the purpose of Plato’s writings was always the education of the intellect by removing obstacles that preclude truth: not the conveying of specific information into the mind. Essay VII opens with the comparison with Shakespeare: ‘From Shakespeare to Plato, from the philosophic poet to the poetic philosopher, the transition is easy, and the road is crowded with illustrations of our present subject’.54 Perhaps this is intended to recall Coleridge’s use of Hamlet as an exemplar of Method in Essay IV: Hamlet’s intellect (according to the latter essay) is in fact labyrinthine and pursues methodical connections to excess, but behind the character stands the perfectly methodical author, Shakespeare.55 Plato, by comparison, might be said methodically to animate his apparently labyrinthine dialogues; and Coleridge himself would hope to extend this thought to his own ‘exoteric’ Friend. Coleridge certainly presents his Essays on Method as essentially pedagogical, eschewing the most difficult metaphysical topics, but providing a guiding light as to thinking in general. Here he mentions again Plato’s campaign against the Sophists, who would ‘mechanise’ and ‘paint over’ the mind (an elegant characterization of the false ‘method’ which produces more obviously neat results, but denies intellectual truth): so also we are invited to think that Coleridge’s progress through these essays is so erratic because of his essentially polemical purpose. This insistence in Essay VII on the harmony of poetry and philosophy helps to explain a further point of interest in the footnote on innate ideas just quoted. Coleridge, that is, asserts the doctrine of innate (or connate) ideas to be part of Plato’s ‘poetic drapery’.56 This is not an inappropriate expression to use of (say) the myth of anamnesis in Phaedrus. But here too Coleridge probably has his own procedure in mind as he discusses Plato: The Friend has its own poetic drapery, its ‘sweet Baits of literature’, designed to convey partial but not total, naked Truth. The veiling quality of Plato’s ‘poetic drapery’, then, becomes a justifying reason for Coleridge’s equivocation — his obscure setting out of the choice between the Ideas of Reason as self-produced or as

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innate. The problem seems to be that to claim the Ideas of Reason are self-produced it is necessary to elaborate the concept of Will, but that this is exactly the esoteric discussion Coleridge postpones until the Opus Maximum. The second answer to the question of what is the ‘unconditional ground’ appears to be ‘God’. This would make sense given Coleridge’s assertion that relations of law (or principle) occur in perfect form only in the divine mind. Again, however, Coleridge prefers to hint rather than state this, and once more the hint is made via Plato. Coleridge exclaims at the ‘remarkable fact [. . .] that the material world is found to obey the same laws as had been deduced independently from the reason’,57 and that corporeal mass acts by some ‘force’ beyond its mere component parts. There exists, that is, a mysterious but constantly experienced link between the two (Kantian) worlds, that of Reason and that of matter. Coleridge attributes to Plato the insistence that neither the pure rationalism of Zeno nor the atomism of Democritus suffice to answer the question ‘what is the ground of the coincidence between reason and experience? Or between the laws of matter and the ideas of the pure intellect?’58 However, Coleridge again truncates the discussion through an elliptical and unspecific citation of Plato: The only answer which Plato deemed the question capable of receiving, com­ pels the reason to pass out of itself and seek the ground of this agreement in a supersensual essence, which being at once the ideal of reason and the cause of the material world, is the pre-establisher of the harmony in and between both.59

Coleridge does not explain what this ‘supersensual essence’ is: this remains another esoteric mystery and (like the ambiguously explained ‘unconditioned’) a kind of preparation for the peroration on God as the ‘I AM IN THAT I AM’ in Essay XI. When Coleridge repeats this formulation almost verbatim in the Opus Maximum, however, he both deletes the authority-figure (Plato) and completes the thought: The only answer is that both have their ultimate ground, and are ultimately identified in, a supersensual essence, the principle of existence in all essences and of the essences in all existence, or the Supreme Reason that constitutes the objects which it contemplates and by the powers thus constituted, viz. the divine Ideas, gives being to the whole phaenomenal universe.60

But Coleridge would regard the divine Ideas as an esoteric topic, and so truncates what he writes in the exoteric Friend. Coleridge continues to hold poetry and philosophy in tandem as he pursues his self-defence via Plato — and Bacon — in Essay VIII. His strategy for reconciling these two writers (which he had planned to do as early as 180361) is to insist on the one hand on Plato’s rigour of philosophical thought, and on the other on Bacon’s poetic sensitivity to the truth of the priority of mind in all investigations, embodied in the notion of anamnesis. Beginning the essay by attacking eighteenth-century accusations of Plato’s writings as ‘estranging the mind from sober experience and substantial matter-of-fact, and of debauching it by fictions and generalities’, Coleridge exclaims: ‘Plato, whose method is inductive throughout, who argues on all subjects not only from, but in and by, inductions of facts!’62 Indeed, so concrete is Plato’s thought that he ‘with such unmitigated hostility, pursues the assumptions,

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abstractions, generalities, and verbal legerdemain of the sophists!’63 The reader is, as before, tacitly invited to compare Coleridge’s own painstaking ‘communication of truth’ and combative repudiation of those who write with more overtly commercial motives. Coleridge associates sophistry with mechanical empiricism, and true philosophy with Platonic method based on the ‘initiative IDEA’; so he undertakes to strengthen his position by reclaiming for Platonism a figure conventionally upheld as an apostle of mechanism, Bacon. At first sight the alignment of Bacon with Plato seems eccentric. However, as Coleridge implies, Bacon’s ‘idols’ owe much to Plato: especially the idols of the tribe and of the cave for which Bacon considered Republic VII’s Simile of the Cave to be ‘that most beautiful emblem’.64 Indeed Bacon, despite his often quotably caustic remarks on Plato, considered Plato of ‘sublime wit’, commending precisely those two elements Coleridge emphasizes: Plato’s inductive method and his theory of Ideas.65 Bacon even refers, like Coleridge, to the slaveboy episode of the Meno to introduce a comment on anamnesis: For a faculty of wise interrogating is half a knowledge. For as Plato saith: ‘Whosoever seeketh, knoweth that which he seeketh for in a general notion; else how shall he know it when he hath found it.’ And therefore the larger your anticipation is, the more direct and compendious is your search.66

The recommendation of ‘large anticipation’ would have struck a chord with Coleridge, who paraphrases precisely this passage.67 Recollecting the ‘Ground’ in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ ‘From Shakespeare to Plato, from the philosophic poet to the poetic philosopher, the transition is easy, and the road is crowded with illustrations of our present subject’, Coleridge announced robustly to open Essay VII.68 I have been suggesting that, on the contrary, the transition between poetry and philosophy in these essays is tense, ‘poetic drapery’ often functioning to abbreviate demonstration. Further, it is true that the ‘road’ is ‘crowded with illustrations’, sometimes so crowded that the illustrations threaten to swallow up Coleridge’s thesis.69 That there might be rhetorical loss as well as gain in such a procedure Coleridge seems to acknowledge when he remarks in a revealing parenthesis in the final Essay: ‘(for the facts hitherto adduced have been rather for illustration than for evidence, to make our position distinctly understood rather than to enforce the conviction of its truth)’.70 Any conviction in the reader’s mind must derive not from logical ‘enforcement’ but rather from two extrinsic sources: first, Coleridge’s promise that he is making a sincere, thoroughly audience-conscious attempt to communicate truth adequately, or failing that, ‘rightly’ (this includes his candid admission that he has not actually proved anything); and second, his citations of brilliant ‘authorities’, especially Plato. These are the two criteria by which Coleridge insistently differentiates his rhetoric from that of the Sophists, ancient and modern. The concluding Essay on Method, however, faces the difficult problem of tying up all the disparate threads begun in the preceding ten essays, and I agree with Murray J. Evans in finding it ‘puzzling’ and its rhetoric less ‘satisfactory’ than a parallel section of the Opus Maximum.71 I wish in this section to pursue this contrast with the Opus Maximum. And yet, some

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of the most compelling of Coleridge’s poetic prose often occurs when the argument itself is not obviously coherent: it is no accident that Emerson, whose concept of Reason was thoroughly poeticized, was so excited by Essay XI on Method. I shall begin, then, with the first section of the essay, which seems to me the most convincing. Without attempting sequential argument, Coleridge here subtly proposes anamnesis as offering a solution to the problem raised earlier: what is the ‘ground’ common to man and to the world which enables them to interact? When man begins ‘an earnest seeking after, some ground common to the world and to man, therein to find the one principle of permanence and identity, the rock of strength and refuge, to which the soul may cling amid the f leeting surge-like objects of the senses’,72 then he ‘sallies forth into nature — in nature, as in the shadows and ref lections of a clear river, to discover the originals of the forms presented to him in his own intellect’.73 These intellectual forms are clearly Platonic. Initially misled, the Coleridgean seeker hangs delighted over the ‘shadows’ his senses perceive, like Narcissus (later, in the austerer Opus Maximum, Coleridge identifies the pantheistic imagination as a ‘Mad Narcissus’ indulging a ‘Vain Pride of Intellect’74). The seeker’s conscience tells him that he has ‘free agency’ — but he cannot find a ground or ‘representative’ (or objective correlative?) for this freedom anywhere in external nature, presumably because unlike the internal world, the physical world is subject to necessity. Eventually there dawns an awareness of anamnesis: ‘he learns at last that what he seeks he has left behind’.75 Nature — objective reality — proves after all ‘a modification of his own being’: hence the narcissism intrinsic to the contemplation of nature. Coleridge sums this up in one unobtrusively key sentence: ‘In order therefore to the recognition of himself in nature man must first learn to comprehend nature in himself, and its laws in the ground of his own existence’.76 Before this Neoplatonic vision of nature as a modification of consciousness, however, Coleridge inserts a long quotation from Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’.77 He appends no commentary except another footnoted esoteric gesture, to the effect that only elite minds will be capable of appreciating the sublimity of the Ode, as he had similarly argued in Biographia.78 Nevertheless, the bare quotation is rich in implication: (i) For readers who know the earlier poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, it places the discussion in the context of their ‘dejection debate’ in the early 1800s. Wordsworth had at that time explored the Narcissus-theme in poems such as ‘Lines Written Upon the Seat of a Yew Tree’. It is likely that the second part of the ‘Immortality Ode’ was itself written partly in response to Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’: both poets lamented the loss of the ‘gleam’ they had once perceived in nature, and admitted that it had been a projection of their own consciousness, but both sought a way to recuperate the former ‘joy’. The Platonic anamnesis in the ‘Immortality Ode’ (which Wordsworth later cautiously said he employed not as doctrine but for its poetic propriety) was probably prompted by conversations with Coleridge, who was enthusiastically reading Proclus at the time.79 Coleridge’s quotation of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ could be seen as his final contribution to this poetic conversation: the quotation implies an interpretation of the poem that is both Platonic and optimistic.

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(ii) The quotation of the Ode sets up reverberations with other passages of The Friend. Thus the rhetorically vigorous conclusion to Essay IX on Method condemns materialists as ‘blind to the master-light’ of human being: ‘master light’ being a quotation from the ‘Immortality Ode’.80 The metaphor of consciousness as a masterlight was also evoked in the essays ‘On the Communication of Truth’. Unlike those who ‘exist in fragments’, writes Coleridge, people of methodical, sincere, connected consciousness are so by virtue of looking back with affection on ‘their former selves’:81 and to express this he quotes ‘The Rainbow’ (‘The Child is Father of the Man’), which was the epigraph for the ‘Immortality Ode’. (This emphasis on the formativeness of very early childhood experience and our subsequent response to it is theorized in the Opus Maximum, as I discuss below.) (iii) The context of anamnesis in Coleridge’s essay throws emphasis on Wordsworth’s mysterious celebration of . . .those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing;82

where the moral basis of anamnesis that might be implied by ‘first affections’ fits Coleridge’s purposes. Further, Wordsworth stresses the existence of the affections and recollections (‘be [. . .] Are [. . .] Are’): they ‘are yet the fountain light’ in the sense that their simple existence is more important than their particular content (‘be they what they may’, it hardly matters), and also in the sense that they ‘are yet’, i.e. continue even now to animate our experience. This is consonant with Coleridge’s emphasis in this essay on ‘BEING, BEING, [. . .] BEING’.83 Finally, Wordsworth’s lines convey the paradox that the light which enables ‘our seeing’ (rhymed, significantly from a Coleridgean perspective, with ‘being’) issues from shadowy recollections: the kind of reversal which might constitute ‘obstinate questionings | Of sense and outward things’. Coleridge too, much more overtly than Wordsworth, encourages his reader to question outward things — to ‘see’ them, in fact, in a new way, as really inward things. Coleridge comes very close to Wordsworth’s paradox of light emerging from darkness when he ref lects that Method should, out of the ‘unsubstantial shows of existence’ which we normally take for reality but which actually ‘are but negations of sight’, bring ‘that singleness of eye, with which “the whole body shall be full of light” ’.84 This notion of the negation of sight, suggestively glanced at here, will become vital in the Opus Maximum. Although Coleridge does not use the word anamnesis, the concept is in play: Method is portrayed poetically as a process of remembering the ground of our being by contemplating and analysing natural phenomena, (re)discovering through scientific laws that these natural phenomena are in truth modifications of our being. Essay XI becomes arguably less convincing, however, when Coleridge begins to dogmatize about that ‘being’, or ‘ground’, or ‘ground of being’.85 As Evans argues, this ‘discourse is more lyrical than persuasive in a number of ways’.86 First, there is often little coherence between one paragraph and the next, a culmination of the

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generally labyrinthine progress of the Method essays; Coleridge acknowledged this in his note on one paragraph in particular, regretting the ‘loose, oozy’ connection with the preceding material,87 and his many notes to revise subsequent pages ref lect his dissatisfaction with the whole section. Related to this problem, many statements are unsubstantiated and abrupt: an example is the assertion that ‘all true reality has both its ground and its evidence in the will’,88 which seems crucial, but inadequately prepared. There are also rhetorical questions whose answers are not inevitable (‘By what name then canst thou call a truth so manifested? Is it not REVELATION?’89); and further, the terminology for Method wavers confusingly: ‘the principle of religion, not ‘a sort of knowledge’ but ‘a form of BEING’.90 Coleridge is attempting to convey a Schellingian ‘intuition of absolute existence’, ‘an opening of the inward eye to the glorious vision of that existence which admits of no question out of itself, acknowledges no predicate but the I AM IN THAT I AM!’91 But he alternates between what Evans calls a ‘vague lyricism’ and a strained register of sublimity: ‘And the manifesting power, the source and the correlative of the ideas thus manifested — is it not GOD? [. . .] GOD [. . .] GOD’.92 This insistent exclaiming resembles the declamation of Coleridge’s poem ‘Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouny’: ‘GOD! let the Torrents, like a Shout of Nations | Answer! and let the Ice-plains echo, GOD!’93 The comparison with the Chamouny Hymn highlights, I think, the tension that undermines this essay. On the one hand, Coleridge is introducing his discourse of ‘Idea’, which is self-sufficient and cannot be derived from sense-objects. The Idea ‘manifests itself ’; again, man ‘in his idea’ is ‘subsumed in the divine humanity’. Most importantly, we must contemplate the ‘divine idea’ as ‘the final cause of all creation’.94 On the other hand, just as in the Hymn Coleridge tries to deduce ‘GOD!’ from observation of the sublime in nature, so in the essay he relies for evidence of the divine Idea on the argument from design. The reader is instructed to behold in all nature the adaptation of means to ends and to meditate on the nature of the Creator who ordained it so and made the world ‘for the sake of man’.95 In both works — poem and essay — Coleridge strains for a sublime register because he is not really convinced by Paley’s argument from design that had brief ly attracted him during his Unitarian phase.96 But in clinging to it, he does not give full articulation to his theory of ‘Ideas’. In contrast to this hectic discourse is, as Evans argues, Coleridge’s lengthy and patient treatment of the idea of God in the concluding section of the Opus Maxi­ mum fragment ‘On the Divine Ideas’. Here Coleridge’s position is refreshingly clear. He states that the idea of God is indemonstrable, since it is the ground of all dem­ onstrations. To put it another way, no ‘science of God’ is possible. This assertion does not undermine faith, but rather provides a new opportunity for faith — the Idea of God, like all Ideas, must arise within, and cannot be evolved from external ‘evidences’. Unlike in Essay XI on Method, however, Coleridge does not rely on rhe­torical exclamations to communicate his position. Instead he undertakes to refute every possible argument for the existence of God: only in this slow but sure way can the in­dem­onstrability be demonstrated. Although Coleridge’s review of the argu­ments is far from complete, it is coherent, as Evans’s reconstruction outlines. In particular

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Coleridge unsentimentally reveals the inadequacy of the design argument.97 His counter-argument (brief ly summarized) is that in order to discern what we believe to be proofs of a divine order in the world, we must have a prior Idea of the divine. Much more firmly than in the Essays on Method, then, Coleridge insists on a Platonic notion of Ideas, including the Idea of God: that they can only be known ‘by their own light’ and that their necessity can only be demonstrated negatively. The Opus Maximum: Aims and Status of the Text The level of detail, strictness of definition, and (for those within the Church of England mainstream) potentially shocking conclusion — that we cannot prove the existence of God — clearly differentiate the fragment ‘On the Divine Ideas’ from the related discussions in The Friend. This is typical of a general contrast between the two works. The Friend argues the need for a ‘system’ articulated in complex prose with long chains of logical argument; but it actually proceeds in fragments, with quotations of ‘authority’, assertions, and rhetorical exclamations. The Opus Maximum on the other hand, whilst offering no direct comments on style, approaches the ideal sketched in The Friend: the so-called ‘fragments’ that constitute it represent Coleridge’s work at its densest and most conceptually complex, unfolding in a connected fashion the most challenging theological topics. For that reason it is unlikely to be much read by those who look exclusively for ‘literary’ interest in Coleridge.98 Yet I want to suggest that although the prose of the Opus Maximum is convoluted and lacks the elegance of The Friend or Biographia, it is also refreshingly free. This apparent paradox is explicable by the absence of the anxiety of reception surrounding the Opus Maximum. Exceptionally in his career, Coleridge now had the sense of an ideal audience. When he dictated the manuscript, he was no longer constrained by the financial necessity of publication, which, though intended, was indefinitely deferred. Rather than declaim to the anonymous hydra-headed reading public, he was able to speak as it were privately to amanuenses. Chief among these was ‘my friend and enlightened Pupil, Mr. Green’,99 who was also the privileged recipient of the Tennemann marginalia; Green not only took dictation, but also procured, for instance, a copy of Proclus in Greek — exactly what Coleridge had wished for when reading Taylor’s trans­lation many years previously.100 As H. J. Jackson notes, without Green’s collab­oration the Opus Maximum would never have come into existence at all.101 It is doubt­ less owing to this friendly audience that the Opus Maximum, attractively, lacks the reader-baiting casuistry of The Friend. Instead, authorial addresses to the reader are respectful and non-disruptive: the reader is quietly presumed to be a ‘professed enquirer’; an ‘earnest enquirer’ aware of reading a difficult work ad­dressed to ‘the speculative intellect’. Appealing to ‘the inward experience of our readers’ the author awaits rather than demands a congenial response. Again, at a difficult point the reader is counselled ‘not to be impatient with himself or us’ if he (the masculine pronoun is Coleridge’s) does not at once understand.102 Addressed to this kind of ideally receptive reader, and confronting the topics of Will, the origin of evil, and the Divine Ideas which the exoteric Friend had deferred, the Opus Maximum comes closest of any text to a full exposition of

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Coleridge’s esoterica. Or rather, of the esoterica of Coleridge’s Plato, as Coleridge seemed to be suggesting when he proposed the following quotation from Proclus as part of ‘a motto for my Work, Assert. of Religion’: But it is necessary that I should unfold the mode of the proposed doctrine, what it is requisite to expect it will be, and define the preparatives which a hearer of it ought to possess; that being properly adapted, he may approach, not to our discourses, but to the intellectually elevated and deific philosophy of Plato. For it is proper that convenient aptitudes of auditors should be proposed according to the forms of discourses, just as in the mysteries, those who are skilful in concerns of this kind, previously prepare receptacles for the Gods.103

By ‘Assert. of Religion’ Coleridge means the Opus Maximum, although he then suggests that the motto would in fact ‘better suit the Logical Prologomena’ than the Opus itself.104 This is intelligible in the light of his declaration in the Opus Maximum that the Logic ‘was in fact written as the Prologomena, προπαιδευτικα, of the present work’.105 The reference to the mysteries in the proposed motto accurately evokes the esoteric quality of the Opus Maximum: only those readers who have undergone a certain prior discipline are fit to receive it. Further, it suggests that ‘the deific philo­ sophy of Plato’ is central to the esoteric content of the Opus Maximum. Coleridge moreover wanted the Opus Maximum (taken as a sequel to the Logic) to embody his system. Yet the difficulty of his completing a system is everywhere evident, for example in the fact that the supposedly exhaustive review of arguments for the existence of God is so incomplete. It is symptomatic that Fragment One begins with the words: ‘Chapter III’, as though there were perpetually some new piece of argumentative architecture to be built in. But the sublime sense of something ever more about to be seemed to be essential to Coleridge’s pursuing the work at all.106 To Sterling Coleridge wrote: Many a fond dream have I amused myself with of your residing near me or in the same house, and preparing with you & Mr. Green’s assistance, my whole system for the Press, as far as it exists in writing, in any systematic form.107

The fondness of this dream is indicated by Coleridge’s explicit admission that his ‘system’ is not really ‘systematic’ at all, and the hint that (as John Simon later said) ‘there was a tradition of his oral teachings’.108 It is as though Coleridge was living out the principle that Friedrich Schlegel expressed as follows in the Athenaeum fragments: ‘Es ist gleich tödlich für den Geist, ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben. Er wird sich also wohl entschließen müssen, beides zu verbinden’ [It is equally deadly for the spirit to have a system, and to have no system. It must indeed decide to have both].109 So the fragments of the Opus Maximum achieve no closure, and it was left to Green to try to systematize the Coleridgean esoterica. This was inevitably an impossible task since the esoteric, in Coleridge’s implicit conception, can never be written out in complete propositional form. The solid material bulk of the Collected Coleridge edition is in this sense potentially misleading, in conveying the sense of a fixed edifice. Indeed McFarland, as editor, has effectively resumed Green’s labours in supplying learned footnotes which threaten to overwhelm the text, and 240 pages of ‘Prologomena’ which supply enough context in terms of Coleridge’s personal development and the history of ideas to

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heave Coleridge’s project closer to completion. This is a prime example of what David Simpson calls ‘the editorial sublime’; McFarland’s prose, too, replete with such adjectives as ‘vast’ and ‘urgent’, strives for a sublime register.110 The attempt to complete Coleridge’s endeavour necessarily involves McFarland in certain inconsistencies. First, as to ‘system’: McFarland insists thunderously on Coleridge’s ‘total commitment to system’, declaring ‘we must guard against mistaking the fragmentary nature of the magnum opus as in any way implying doubt about the necessity of system’.111 In a later section, though, McFarland recuperates the work’s fragmentariness as first an ‘irrelevance’ and then fully a virtue judged from modern perspectives which reject the aspiration to system, ‘analytic philosophy and philosophy of existence’. McFarland now compares Pascal’s Penseés and avers that ‘to systematise the fragments’ is to ‘do violence to the inner truth of the work’ — a curious commentary on his own editorial procedure.112 A second inconsistency lies in McFarland’s two arguments, on the one hand that Coleridge’s project is essentially polemical (against Epicureanism, the French Enlightenment, and Paley), and on the other that it (in Coleridge’s words) ‘opposes no other system’, being completely inclusive and in tone ‘irenic’.113 McFarland’s antinomies actually reveal something about Coleridge’s own double-mindedness: chief ly his need to project a system, and equal need constantly to defer its completion. Yet they do result in questionable editorial emphases. For instance the enormous footnotes take over the task of including all past systems; whereas Coleridge himself claims repeatedly to be presenting arguments a priori, and despite his congenital digressiveness, keeps his own footnotes and quotations to a minimum. Without disputing that the intellectual background to the Opus Maximum is as extensive as McFarland’s notes indicate (and I cite below a number of parallel passages in the fourth Notebook, and further allusions to Plato and to Milton not picked up by McFarland), my argument is that the uniquely ‘esoteric’ quality of this work causes it to differ from Coleridge’s other prose works in citing ‘authorities’ deliberately rarely. Coleridge attempts to demonstrate the moral law by necessary argument, and likewise to establish a priori the possibility of the Christian Trinity, whose actuality may thereafter — but not beforehand — be confirmed by recourse to tradition.114 This is ref lected in a different use of Plato in the Opus Maximum as compared with The Friend. In The Friend Plato functions as an ‘authority’ to justify Coleridge’s views in the absence of full arguments. In the Opus Maximum Plato is cited relatively little, and yet is constantly in the background. Coleridge cites Kant, on the other hand, rather more frequently (since he need not fear a prejudice against ‘German metaphysics’ from readers of the Opus Maximum), but also attempts to correct Kant from a Platonic viewpoint. In developing this view I am contesting McFarland’s argument in a section entitled ‘ THE CONSERVATISM OF THE MAGNUM OPUS: ITS MEANING WITH RESPECT TO THE PAST’. McFarland rightly locates the conservatism of Coleridge’s project as attempting ‘to hold in philosophical place the certainties of the Christian religion that had already been damagingly compromised by the anti-religious efforts of the French Enlightenment’:115 the Opus Maximum is in this sense backward-looking, reacting to the fact that the old truths were being

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rapidly dislodged, especially in the form of incipient evolutionary theory. But McFarland continues: To protect against this destructive f lood, Coleridge summoned Plato and Kant to provide girders of thought to reinforce the dam he sought to erect. That act of reinforcement, indeed, is the whole function of those two great thinkers in Coleridge’s sense of his own intellectual priorities.116

Coleridge was helped, according to McFarland, by ‘an essential similarity’ in the ‘total meaning’ of Plato and Kant; especially since ‘both philosophies agreed with his in marking out a realm of timeless permanence, symbolised in Plato by the realm of ideas, in Kant by the thing-in-itself, and in Coleridge by the conception of God’. Further: ‘Plato in all his attitudes was conservative, and his thought is a citadel that repels growth and change’.117 This argument seems to spring from McFarland’s questionable emphasis on Coleridge’s desire to include all earlier systems within his own. To begin with the last point: Coleridge was cautious — and his caution was often more appropriate than the confidence of modern scholars — in identifying the ‘attitudes’ of Plato from his dialogues. Moreover, the notion that Plato ‘repels growth and change’ is highly selective, ruling out the dynamic view of Platonism maintained by Coleridge. (A central argument of Church and State was to be that two polar forces are equally necessary to society, ‘permanence and progression’.) Likewise, the whole magnum opus is designed to promote growth, not stasis, in readers’ minds; it was on the contrary the accommodating neoEpicureanism of Paley which Coleridge identified as the contemporary agent of intellectual stagnation. Kant and Plato, therefore, were more than merely girders of ‘reinforcement’ in Coleridge’s mind. Nor did he summon them unproblematically ‘together’, since Coleridge regarded them as differing on ‘the highest problem of philosophy’, the question whether Ideas are regulative or constitutive. Finally, Plato and Kant are not entirely straightforward allies for upholding the truth of Christianity; I want now to explore how Coleridge does co-opt Plato to the Christian cause, but also to highlight where he parts company from Kant. To facilitate this, I brief ly summarize the key arguments in the Opus Maximum. The Idea of Will, the Trinity, and the Origin of Evil In the Essays on Method Coleridge had defined the grand problem of philosophy as ‘ for all that exists conditionally [i.e. in time and space] [. . .] to find a ground that is uncon­ ditional and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system’, but he was less than clear about the nature of this ‘ground’.118 In the Opus Maximum this search is both more fully developed and more explicit: the ‘ground’ is Will. Coleridge’s opening assumption is that as human beings we have a responsible Will, defined as ‘the power of originating a state’. Citing Kant, Coleridge asserts that the good Will is the only unconditional good, and further that we are conscious of a peremptory inner ‘injunction’ to obey the moral law, i.e. the categorical imperative.119 Since the existence of the conscience and free will cannot be logically demonstrated, it is possible for an individual to deny them. Yet such a denial is itself a moral act, directing the Will to love of self rather than of God, and this self-love

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is the opposite of good, i.e. evil. So fundamental is the conscience to humanity that it is in fact logically prior to consciousness.120 This assertion can be seen from two points of view, one human, the other metaphysical. In human terms, an infant becomes conscious of the being of an other, i.e. the mother, before it becomes conscious of its own being: no ‘I’ is possible without a preceding ‘thou’.121 Thus alterity is necessary to human identity, and it immediately constructs the primal human relationship in terms of the Categorical Imperative, since our self-consciousness through consciousness of the other means that we are obliged to treat the other as we would be treated — in fact, as fully equal to our self. In an extremely dense passage, Coleridge makes some further ‘subtle’ steps in this argument: ‘the consciousness expressed in the term “Thou” is only possible by an equation in which “I” is taken as equal to but yet not the same as “Thou” ’, and this in turn is only possible by treating the I and Thou ‘in logical antithesis, [. . .] as correspondent harmonies or correlatives’. And for this to be possible, we must be affirming something in thinking ‘I’ that we negative in thinking ‘Thou’ — otherwise I and Thou would be ‘Sames and indistinguishable’.122 Coleridge claims that this ‘something’ that we think in the ‘I’ but do not think in the ‘Thou’ ‘can only be the Will’. He concludes this section of the argument with a characteristically helter-skelter chain of reasoning: Now this equation of Thou with I, by means of a free act which negative the sameness in order to establish the equality — this, I say, is the true definition of Conscience. But as the plural presupposes the singular, as without a Thou there can be no Ye, and without these no They, whether These or Those, and as all these conjointly constitute the materials and subjects of consciousness, and these again the conditions of experience, it is evident [that this] is the root of all human consciousness, and à fortiori the pre-condition of all experience; and therefore that the conscience in its first revelation cannot have been deduced from experience. Q. E. D.123

Of interest is both the conclusion drawn in this passage — that conscience is the ground of personhood, and that the consciousness of Will is the defining difference between our concept of self and that of an equal other — and the presentation. Coleridge is attempting far greater argumentative rigour than anywhere in The Friend: he dispenses with authorities and with the sweet baits of literature in order to allow Reason to present itself connectedly, uninterruptedly, and conclusively: ‘Q. E. D’. He is enabled to do this because he is making a free investigation of Will, unfettered by the anxiety of reception. This argument has its metaphysical application in Coleridge’s attempt to prove the possibility of the Christian Trinity. Again, Coleridge’s prose is demonstrative and eschews authorities, since the argument is one of speculative Reason: if the possibility of the Trinity is established by Reason a priori, testimonies of revelation and tradition will be so much the more powerful confirmations that this possibility is also an actuality. The first Person of the Trinity is God the Father, but in line with the reasoning just presented, he cannot be said to exist until he has willed the existence of another, i.e. the Son. Like human parent and child, Father and Son are bound in a relation of love, by the third Person, the Holy Ghost.124 Again, the first

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Person is identified with Will, and Will is logically prior to Being, identified with the second Person.125 Coleridge expresses this by the (dubious) suggestion that the name of Jehovah given in Exodus 3. 14, ‘I am in that I am’ (as he quoted it in The Friend) can be ‘literally’ translated ‘That which I will to be I shall be’.126 This assertion of the primacy of Will enables Coleridge to explore what he had deferred as (Plato’s) esoterica in The Friend: the origin of evil. To begin this time at the metaphysical level: there exist ‘distinct beings [. . .] in the plenitude of the Supreme Mind, whose essence is Will and whose actuality consists in their Will being one with the Will of God’.127 There must, however, be a potential Will which does not coincide with the Will of God: otherwise there would be no meaning in the Idea of a Will distinct from, yet one with, God’s Will.128 It is possible, in other words, for a Will to will its actuality in Self rather than in God. To will against God is to will the contrary of good, i.e. evil. And ‘in Will alone causation inheres. To will Evil, therefore, is to originate Evil’.129 In a fall which occurred prior (logically rather than temporally) to the fall of man, this potential to will evil was actualized, i.e. ‘a self became, which was not God, nor One with God’. Since all actuality inheres in God, however, this was not a true actualization, but ‘by a strange yet appropriate contradiction’ remained ‘potential’.130 The self which thus became was a false self, paradoxically self-begotten, the Father of Lies. The human application of this metaphysical doctrine is that our Will is finite, and by virtue of its finitude not at one with the infinite Will of God: it is therefore radically evil. In this sense, not in the ‘monstrous’ sense of hereditary guilt derived from historical figures named Adam and Eve, Coleridge asserts the doctrine of original sin.131 Our conscience is a barometer telling us how and to what extent our Will is sinful, i.e. straying from the divine Will. Coleridge lays particular stress on childhood as a formative time for the moral being. A moral relation, a relation of love between two free beings, mother and infant, constitutes the dawn of human life.132 Hence the role of the mother is crucial in the infant’s development: she faces the momentous choice between encouraging the infant to direct its attention either to herself, a moral being who can reciprocate love, or to the fixed and dead world of external objects. In the latter case, the child finds his moral sensibility unreciprocated, and this encourages the development of a false ego. In this way Coleridge theorizes the poetic insights of Wordsworth he had quoted in The Friend: that ‘The Child is Father of the Man’, and that our ‘first affections’ determine much of the later development of the person. How is Plato used in these arguments? First, the centrality of the ‘I am in that I am’ of Exodus 3. 14, rendered by Coleridge ‘that which I will to be I shall be’, is a pillar of Christian Platonist tradition. As we have seen, Coleridge was reading Proclus’ Platonic Theology at the time of composing the Opus, so he would have been reminded of the relevant passage in Timaeus.133 Second, Christian Platonist tradition also maintained that the origin of sin is self-will, using Plato’s statement in the Laws that it is proper that he who is destined to be a great man should neither love himself, nor the things pertaining to himself, but that he should love just actions, whether they are accomplished by himself or by another. In consequence of this error, every man’s ignorance appears to himself to be wisdom.134

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Third, Coleridge declares it probable that Plato had esoterically taught the doctrine of the Trinity in its true form.135 As part of his attempt at exhaustive, systematic analysis of the possible alternatives to his own beliefs, Coleridge reviews non- (or pseudo-)Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the most historically powerful of which is the Neoplatonic Trinity of Plotinus and his successors. Coleridge condemns the latter, however, because it is (in Coleridge’s view) invariably subordinationist: it rests on the doctrine of emanation from the One (identified with the Good), which implies that the second and third hypostases (nous and dianoia) are diminishments from the pure Source. Coleridge’s Christian Trinity, on the other hand, is based on a principle of equality between the three Persons. Whilst admitting that he cannot offer evidence from Plato’s texts, since Plato would not commit such ref lections to writing, he proposes that Plato maintained this doctrine in its pure form, which was corrupted by the Neoplatonists.136 Concomitantly, Coleridge extols Plato’s conception of the Supreme Being.137 This praise echoes what Coleridge had said in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Plato had taught men that after going through all the highest exertions of the faculties which nature had given them, cultivating their senses, their under­ standings, their reason, and their moral powers, yet still there was a ground wanting, a something that could not be found within the sphere of their knowledge. Yet knowledge led men to ask for that ground, and this he placed in the Supreme Being as the final result of all human effort and human reasoning.138

Despite the paucity of direct references to Plato in the Opus as compared with The Friend, many more parallels and derivations could be noted. I wish to focus, however, on one example of Coleridge’s use of a Platonic notion to contest Kantian ethics in Fragment One. In arguing that the Good Will is the sole unconditional moral good Coleridge cites Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, with whom I accord only so far as it [sic] is opposed to the modern Epicurean [. . .] The points in which I disagree with [Kant] — those, namely, in which he differs from the Christian code — and the philosophical grounds of my disagreement will appear in its own place in another part of this work.139

There is (as ever) no such full explanation elsewhere, but a few pages later there appears another note criticizing Kant’s ethics in terms of some Greek categories: as in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Coleridge critiques contemporary German thought via Ancient Greek anticipations. The note distinguishes three types of happiness. ‘The first is that testifying state of the Good Will’ named μακαριοτής or bliss: ‘the Spiritual in our nature’. The second ‘belongs in like manner to the intellectual’. Coleridge complains that the debasement of language has deprived us of a word for this, and so coins ‘eunoya’ or ‘eunöy’. ‘The third is “Pleasure”, the “ηδονη” of the Greeks, i.e. the aggregate of the sensations arising from the co-incidence, conformed in kind and degree with the stimulability of the sentient individual’.140 Coleridge presents the hierarchy emphatically: The first is alone unconditionally good; the second good when employed in the service of the first, and innocent except when employed to its difference; the third (i.e. considered in relation to a moral and rational being in a probationary

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state) innocent only when made assistant to the second and first. [. . .] The first is the master working at the head of his labourers; the second is the free servant, the unhired tenant, who offers the first fruits to his Lord, and on what remains receives a blessing of increase; the third is the harnessed buffalo that is unmuzzled only while it treads out the corn, and is fed when it must be and because it must be and as little as it can be, and is tolerated only as far as it is serviceable to the second and compatible with the first.141

This is reminiscent of Plato in three ways. First, in Timaeus, the appetitive part of the soul is described as like a beast, untamed but necessary to be maintained: it is stationed in a low part of the body so that, always feeding at its stall, it remains as far as possible from the seat of council.142 Second, notwithstanding Coleridge’s fervent restriction of bodily pleasure, he is here attempting to reclaim intellectual pleasure (eunoya) from Kantian disapproval. Third, Coleridge’s triad is strongly reminiscent of the charioteer and two horses in Plato’s Phaedrus: it is typical that Coleridge should challenge Kantian dualism via a Platonic triad. A note to this passage suggests that Kant and Fichte have erred and verged towards enthusiasm in their confusion of the second with the third, the eunöya with the Hedone, the desirable of the intellect with the desirable of the body, and the exclusion of both indifferently from the permanent objects of the rational Will.

Indeed, Kant argues in Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft [Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason] that one aspect of the radical evil of human nature is its inability to consider the law alone as an all-sufficient incentive, and its need for further incentives.143 In Coleridge’s opinion, ‘Eunoya’ is not spiritual, but can contribute to the spiritual. It should not be excluded from a state of spiritual bliss any more than physical pleasure should be always excluded from the intellectual: ‘still it may be to the spirit as the body to the soul’. The note concludes quite abruptly: There is a body terrestrial, and this we leave behind when it is worn out or its purposes fulfilled; but there is a body celestial, which is imperishable and reproduced by the spirit for ever, abides as its Logos, its Word and express image (εικιον) [sic: εἰκὡν], through which and with which it energizes.144

This is enigmatic, but a comparable discussion in the Lectures on the History of Philo­ sophy helps to unravel Coleridge’s thread. In Lecture Three Coleridge detects a ‘confusion’ in Socrates ‘and even in a number of the [dialogues] of Plato himself ’ over the word ‘happiness’. This time he differentiates four rather than three ‘perfectly distinct states’: (i) bodily, i.e. pleasure, voluptas, ἡδονή; (ii) ‘a certain joyousness [laetitia, εὐφροσύνη], as where Pythagoras discovered the proposition that made him cry out “Eureka!” ’: this seems to correspond to ‘eunoya’ in the Opus note; (iii) the happiness arising from consideration of one’s good fortune in outward circumstances, felicitas, εὐτυχία, εὐδαιμονία: this is omitted in the Opus note; (iv) ‘the peace of God’, corresponding to spiritual bliss in the Opus note.145 ‘Now Socrates was continually vacillating’, asserts Coleridge. Sometimes Socrates suggested that the good lay in mere utility, which is tantamount to the quantity of agreeable sensations; some­t imes he favoured an intellectual harmony; sometimes

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indeed ‘the true piety of blessedness’, but then he ‘again relapses and considers this but another mode of pleasure’. In Coleridge’s view, the consequence of the failure to desynonymize these alternatives was that Socrates’ followers split according to temperament. On the one hand, the morose Cynic Antisthenes understood that happiness consisted in being free from the anxious pursuit of pleasure, and ‘became a mendicant friar’, despising others’ pleasures and living a selfish life under pretence of morality. On the other, the Cyrenaic Aristippus sought as much pleasure as possible, of any kind, not differentiating between the pleasures of poetry and the pleasures of the table.146 From the Cyrenaic sect arose Epicureanism, which effectively reduces all happiness to the physical level — an indirect result of Socrates’ vacillation.147 Contemporaneously with Epicurus, ‘and as if where the poison grew there the antidote was to grow’, Zeno established Stoicism, with some debt to the Cynics but transcending their selfishness.148 While Epicureanism placed the good in the realm of senses, Stoicism, its polar opposite, claimed that the mind is its own place, self-sufficient and detached from the senses. Yet although Stoic morality is, for Coleridge, infinitely preferable to the Epicurean, it lays an insupportable burden on humanity by enjoining perfection without allowing for the inescapable weakness of sinful f lesh. Christianity was the divine medium, since Christ retained Zeno’s insistence on perfection, yet provided the necessary scheme of redemption without which despair must ensue.149 Christianity, through the Incarnation, acknowledges that ‘a finite being has a body and must have a body’, thus banishing ‘metaphysical discussions between the soul and the body as two distinct or two heterogeneous things’.150 Our immortality necessarily involves a continuation of our consciousness, and thus of our conscience, which means ‘truly the resurrection of our body’.151 This is the ‘body celestial’ with which Coleridge concludes the Opus note. Coleridge’s criticism of Kant’s ethics using the Greek terminology, then, aligns Kant with Stoicism.152 Coleridge states that he accords with Kant insofar as the latter combats the ‘modern Epicureanism’ implicit in mainstream contemporary thought, just as he approves of Stoicism insofar as it opposed the original Epicureanism. In both cases, though, he disputes on Christian grounds the sealing off of spiritual bliss from intellectual pleasure — having admitted which, it is necessary for him further to admit the role of physical pleasure for the schöne Seele (beautiful soul). Nevertheless, the image of sensual pleasure as a harnessed buffalo is starkly representative of the general tenor of the Opus Maximum.153 The Indemonstrability of the Idea: Negation The great moral importance of negative Knowledge and Belief in Religion. In this way only can the process of unsensualizing the Soul and purifying the temple of the mind from Idols in order to prepare for the Epiphany of the Ideas [sic]. [. . .] But generally speaking, the Negative, the insight into the not-truth, the not possible of A. B. C. D. and so on S.T.W. is all that the ablest and most gifted Reasoners can help others to. The Positive, the X Y Z they must find for themselves, or meet in themselves. All Ideas are Felicities. The most that can be done by Volition of Thinking, is but like bringing out Stars from the blue sky or in the rifts between sombring Clouds, on a Summer Evening.154

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Most of the conceptual content of the Opus Maximum I have just summarized is expressed in language which approaches the ideal outlined, but not achieved in, The Friend: severely logical, in long demonstrative chains, unbroken by appeals to authority or quotations of poetry. In the terms I used in Chapter 3, it might be said that philosophy is at last triumphing in its quarrel with poetry in this late stage of Coleridge’s career — and this might seem to reinforce the traditional view that Coleridge is no longer an interesting ‘literary’ writer post-1818. Certainly Coleridge associates esoteric material with the aspiration to system, in the sense of an all-encompassing network of propositions, and system in turn with an ascetic attitude to the world of the senses and to art, including poetic language. Thus he introduces his single substantial reference to Shakespeare with an apologetic appeal not to delight but to edification: ‘If in the present work we may without impropriety refer to the work of an author, next to Holy Writ, the most instructive’.155 Coleridge makes a similar apology with regard to Milton, as I discuss below. This kind of askesis — avoiding heteronomy in a work of pure reason — I have labelled Kantian, in view of Kant’s protestation that ‘philosophy is fundamentally prosaic’; it is aptly symbolized by the image of the harnessed buffalo. And yet, Coleridge is keen to differentiate himself from Stoicism, even of the Kantian type, and there was a hint even in that austere note on happiness that art plays a part in Coleridge’s moral scheme, if only as an expression of ‘intellectual happiness’. In fact, although the Opus is ambivalent on the point, I want to claim that a particular kind of poetic language remains necessary to Coleridge — poetic language, that is, which negates rather than celebrates the sensual world. In the Philosophical Lectures, Coleridge referred to this kind of language as symbolic. The vocabulary of symbol barely appears in the Opus Maximum, but I hope to show that the concept remains. To forecast the argument I am now developing: despite the emphasis on demonstration, and corresponding strictly logical prose, the Opus Maximum is frequently punctuated by rhetorical evocations of the sublime, comparable to those of Essay XI on Method, but arguably better-earned. This is because the Ideas, especially Will, being the ground of all demonstration, cannot themselves be demonstrated. Ideas can be apprehended only negatively, by emptying the mind from sense-perceptions. But Coleridge regards this emptying process as like walking along a precipice; a sublime kind of language which effaces sensual associations may easily be in danger of allowing them to rush back into the mind, of unharnessing the buffalo. I show below how Coleridge turns to Milton as a poet who offers the required sort of Idealaden language — albeit with the ambivalence typical of the ‘ancient quarrel’. Underlying Coleridge’s logical demonstrations, then, is the ‘indemonstrable’. He asserts this in the final Essay on Method: ‘For that the very ground, saith Aristotle, is groundless or self-grounded, is an identical proposition. From the indemonstrable f lows the sap, that circulates through every branch and spray of the demonstration’.156 In the Opus Maximum he repeats these words almost exactly,157 and enforces the concept fully and repeatedly. In arguing that no science of God is possible, for example, he acknowledges the shock a devout reader might feel at learning that the Supreme Being is indemonstrable, but promises a new source of faith thereby, since ‘to demonstrate a thing is to establish its antecedent, and thus to construct the thing

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anew; [. . .what is] first can have no antecedent, and what is absolutely One [. . .] no construction’: thus belief in God is placed squarely in the realm of faith.158 Likewise, refuting attempted ‘demonstrations’ of the existence of God, Coleridge highlights ‘the strict and proper as well as etymological sense of the word “demonstrate” ’, in the sense of showing something to be ultimately something else.159 He continues that there are ‘ideas or truths known by their own light’ which are therefore ‘above demonstration’.160 This notion is fundamental to the Opus, the very first sentence in the book being this: ‘In every science something is assumed the proof of which is prior to the science itself ’. This helps (verbally, at least) to clarify the problem of the ‘initiative Idea’ of Coleridgean method, which the Essays on Method left obscure. Before a chain of demonstrations can begin, the philosopher must apprehend an Idea which cannot be demonstrated; at the beginning of the Opus, this is the Idea of Will. Coleridge had noted years earlier that ‘The Trinity, as Bishop Leighton has well remarked, is “a doctrine of faith, not of demonstration”, except in a moral sense’161 — implying that any demonstrative reasoning about the Trinity must stem from the Idea of Will which lies at the root of the moral law. Coleridge insists that an ‘Idea is not simply knowledge or perception as distinguished from the thing perceived: it is a realizing knowledge, a knowledge causative of its own reality’.162 This is Coleridge’s concept of a ‘constitutive’ Idea: Ideas are intelligible to us insofar as they actively constitute our mind. It is natural to ask whether it is possible to talk about Ideas if one defines them in this way, and if so, how. As Vallins says, the interest in Coleridge’s approach to such ‘philosophically insoluble problems’ lies primarily in the circular procedure by which [. . .] Coleridge strives to express an intuition which itself arises primarily from that quest for expression. [. . .] Coleridge’s ideas of God and the processes of the human intellect are consistently characterized by an emphasis on their inexpressibleness which can only arise from a continual confrontation with the limits of language.163

That that liminal confrontation is continual is important: Coleridge’s use of repetition, of what McFarland calls a ‘circumvolving argument’, is crucial to the power of the Opus.164 At a stylistic level this accounts for the obvious difference in the experience of reading the Opus from that of reading Kant. Despite long chains of frequently Kantian argument, Coleridge requires a different register to assert those foundational Ideas which lie beyond the reach of logical argument. A modern defence for this method is made by Ernesto Grassi, who like Coleridge argues from the etymology of the word ‘demonstrate’: ‘To prove [apo-deiknumi] means to show something to be something, on the basis of something. [. . .] Apodictic, demonstrative speech [. . .] establishes the definition of a phenomenon by tracing it back to ultimate principles, or archai’. The archai, or bases, themselves cannot be the object of logical, demonstrative speech, continues Grassi — otherwise they would no longer be the first assertions. Archai ‘cannot have an apodictic, demonstrative character and structure but are thoroughly indicative’. They ‘cannot have a rational but only a rhetorical character’; rhetoric is not, on this definition, ‘the technique of an exterior persuasion; it is rather the speech which is the basis of rational thought’.165 The Opus, which begins and ends with the indemonstrable and therefore the unsayable, relies on rhetoric in Grassi’s sense.

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Admittedly the term ‘rhetoric’ would not satisfy Coleridge, who so anxiously distances himself from the manipulative art of the Sophists, and prefers to identify his own method with the dialectic of Plato. Coleridge himself writes of employing ‘the formal algebra of dialectic, or tentative logic’, a vague formula — but hardly more vague than a modern definition of Plato’s dialectic as ‘a kind of non-formal logic, i.e. a logic which reveals the structure of reality’.166 Coleridge, with his commitment to the Idea of the Logos, liked to play with the word ‘logic’ in this way, and probably considered ‘dialectic’ the appropriate term for his procedure. He would have read Tennemann’s argument that dialectical ‘method’ was as vital to Plato as his practical and theoretical philosophy.167 And he associates all these ideas explicitly in the Opus when he writes that the Platonists purified the mind from its idols by the discipline of the discursive faculty by the common logic, in order that the pupil, by a precise and intimate acquaintance with the proper powers and forms of the finite, or individual, understanding, might be prepared for the dialectic so highly and mysteriously extolled by Plato as the very wings of philosophy by which we ascend from the conditional to the absolute.168

Indeed, Socrates advocates dialectic as the means of apprehending the Idea of the Good, by which reason soars beyond hypotheses to that which is unhypothetical, viz, the principle of the universe, and coming into contact with it, again adhering to those things which adhere to the principle, it may thus descend to the end; using no where any thing which is sensible, but forms themselves, proceeding through some to others, and at length in forms terminating its progression.169

Coleridge, then, strongly emphasizes the negative aspect of dialectic as outlined by Socrates: its function of freeing the mind from the tyranny of objects of senseperception, what Coleridge calls in Biographia ‘the despotism of the eye’ and more theologically in the Opus ‘THE LUST OF THE EYE’.170 The difficulty for Coleridgean dialectic is that language is bound to temporal and spatial reference, whereas a discourse of Ideas must grapple with that which is not presentable under the relations of time and space. Thus the philosopher must try to choose ‘words the least likely to bewilder the judgment of his auditor by the intrusive associations of habitual fancy’.171 This is another manifestation of the problem of ‘the communication of truth’, but at a higher level than in The Friend: whereas readers of The Friend were presumed to be struggling chief ly with their own ignorance, readers of the Opus are confronting the absolute limits of language. Coleridge cites the Pythagoreans’ numerical language, and the musical and geometrical terms of Plato and the Platonists as responses to this linguistic difficulty. For the same reason these philosophers enjoined geometry as ‘the purification of the mind, the first step towards its emancipation from the despotism and disturbing forces of the senses’.172 Coleridge further describes the negative method of Platonic dialectic in the terms familiar from the Philosophical Lectures. The discipline of common logic which provided the preparatory steps for dialectic proceeded, asserts Coleridge, by taking two premises, each undeniable on the level of the understanding, and

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making faultless deductions from each to reach two inevitable conclusions; yet the conclusions ‘are in direct and exclusive contradiction to each other’.173 Coleridge mentions the Parmenides in particular: this is an apt example for his present theme, as it is the most perplexing of Plato’s writings on the theory of Ideas, reaching the apparently sceptical conclusion: ‘whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be’. Coleridge states that The inference is evident, though Plato commonly leaves it to his reader’s own ref lexion: namely, either that all reasoning is a mere illusion, and that the simplest noticing and recording of phaenomena, with the art of arranging the same for the purposes of more easy recollection, constitutes the whole of human knowledge and the sole legitimate object of the human intellect, or [that] there must exist a class of truths to which the measures of time and space and the forms of quantity, quality, and contingent relation are not applicable.174

There is considerable similarity between this passage and the beginning of Biographia chapter nine — which raises the possibility that this thought on the significance of Plato’s negative methodology had struck Coleridge as early as 1801. In Biographia Coleridge relates that having put Berkeley, Leibniz, and Hartley behind him, he began to enquire whether a system of philosophy, ‘as distinct from mere history and historic classification’ is possible at all. He initially felt that ‘the sole practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to collect, and to classify’.175 This could have been around 1802, when Coleridge wrote, ‘last winter I read the Parmenides & the Timaeus with great care’,176 contemporaneously with his first study of Kant. If the narrative of the Biographia is trustworthy, Coleridge’s Plato had long represented a path beyond the Kantian Antinomies. From this preamble on Plato’s dialectical method, Coleridge moves to a discussion of ‘eternity’ as the ‘ground’ of time, comparable to the discussion in Timaeus. Coleridge’s purpose is to establish the priority in order of thought of Will over Being, i.e. of the Father over the Son, which is a non-temporal distinction we struggle in vain to find adequate words for: ‘We are compelled by the constitution of our own conscious understanding [. . .] to attribute relations of cause and effect improperly, and to a transcendent subject’.177 In explaining how to apprehend the Idea of ‘Alterity’, i.e. how an ‘other’ (the Son) can proceed from the One (the Father), Coleridge is led into a ref lection on Platonic Ideas in general, and from there to one of the most self-consciously sublime passages in the whole work. The Idea of Alterity, consequent upon that of Will, is constitutive, i.e. we cannot approach it by analogy or deduce it by logic, but rather it is ‘every where bearing evidence of its own reality according to the reality of the idea’.178 As if sensing that this circular proposition requires a gloss, Coleridge appends a footnote asterisked at the word ‘idea’. Although it does not clarify, it adds a thought on how Plato considered the ideas accessible by anamnesis: The idea of a circle, for instance, compared with the idea of God. Reality is contained in both, though in the first the reality is subjective and mental exclusively while the second affirms an absolute reality. If the expressions of Plato are more than mythical, and if the passages I have in view are not merely a part of the poetic drapery which he clouded a philosophy too lustrous

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for the unprepared eye of his contemporaries, it must have been inattention to this truth — viz. that realities may be different without ceasing to be reality — which led him to the fiction of prototype circles, substantial and living diagrams in some pre-existent state, our present mathematical figures being the ref lexes of these in the troubled mirror which the souls were privileged to carry with them in their fall, and the looking on which constitutes scientific knowledges — which therefore, in consistency with this scheme, the divine philosopher entitles ‘recognitions’.179

This note ref lects Coleridge’s typical caution about Plato based on the fact that, as he says in the philosophical Lectures, we do not well know what Platonism was. The suggestion that the remarkable literary style of the Timaeus in particular may be mere ‘drapery’, moreover, ref lects the puritanical attitude to poetry throughout the Opus Maximum;180 while the sense of Plato as dazzling, yet self-veiling, which Coleridge had long maintained, evidently supports a belief in his esoterica. Among the ‘passages’ of Plato to which Coleridge refers, the primary must be Timaeus 36c-d, in which the Demiurge forms two circles, making them revolve uniformly on one axis, one of the circles interior, the other exterior. ‘The exterior motion he named the motion of the same, the interior that of the Other’. To which ‘truth’ Coleridge thinks Plato may have been inattentive is not obvious; but one point may be that the idea of a circle is regulative (as merely subjective), while that of God is constitutive (as objective, living), and that the circle is therefore not an adequate symbol for God. Coleridge is anyway right to discern a notion in the Timaeus at least closely resembling the doctrine of anamnesis of Phaedo and Phaedrus. When Timaeus relates that the laws of the universe were declared to the soul (in the mixing bowl) before it became differentiated into individual souls, this sounds very similar to the myth that the soul beheld the Ideas in a pre-existent state.181 Poetry in the Opus Maximum: Milton as Sublime Exemplar Whereas in The Friend Coleridge had endorsed the concept of anamnesis by quoting extensively from the ‘Immortality Ode’, in the passage of the Opus just discussed he intimates ambivalence about it. Is it merely part of Plato’s poetic drapery? Does it ref lect inattention to some vital truth, which ought to be rigorously enforced in the Opus? Coleridge exculpates Plato from inconsistency, as before, on the basis that he had two sets of teachings, exoteric and esoteric; but his impatience with ‘poetic drapery’ significantly ref lects the ascetic perspective of the Opus. In pursuing the esoteric subject-matter of the Idea of Will and deductions therefrom, Coleridge prefers strictly functional language instead of the mixture of rhetorical exclamation and poetic quotation he had allowed himself in The Friend. Insofar as this is the case, he shows himself more in sympathy with Plato the banisher of poets than with Plato the poetic philosopher. The Opus suggests that, in apprehending an Idea, the mind must rid itself all those sensuous associations which poetry might encourage. However, at a few points in the Opus Coleridge turns to one particular poet as an ‘authority’ — a use he does not make even of the Bible. Fragment Two opens by appealing to ‘Milton’s authority’ to use the word ‘Arbitrement’ to designate Will as the principal of personality and free agency (Raphael tells Adam, ‘to stand or fall |

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Free in thine own arbitrement it lies’).182 Coleridge emphasizes this elsewhere in his readings of Paradise Lost, stating that in opposition to Calvinism, ‘Milton asserted the will, but declared for the enslavement of the will out of an act of the will itself ’.183 Coleridge was evidently conscious that his Opus shared a fundamental topic with Milton’s Paradise Lost: the Will. The authority of Milton becomes useful later in the same Fragment. Embarking on the sublime passage on the apprehension of the Idea, Coleridge at last departs from his logical, deductive discourse into something else: an attempt to ascend from ‘common logic’ (on the level of Understanding) to ‘higher logic’ (on the level of Reason). To achieve this ascent, he suddenly turns to an authority — not the Bible, Plato, or Kant, but the poet, Milton. Milton’s poetry is invoked to banish the despotism of the eye. Coleridge states that, in contemplating the Idea, ‘the idea itself alone’ must suffice, without help from ‘the eye’, without analogy or example, which would be (so to speak) heteronomous.184 The sublime register of Coleridgean ‘higher logic’ asserts itself in a silence-formula which blends the atmosphere of an ancient mystery religion with that of Christian piety: ‘The silence and the solitude which the lastborn of ancient philosophy adjured over all nature and all spirits must be obtained in the mind before this still small voice can be heard by the soul’. The last-born of ancient philosophy is Proclus, and Coleridge is in fact referring back to the silenceformula of Proclus he quoted earlier, where the purpose was likewise to warn of the difficulty and danger of investigating truths ‘which a Plato deemed scarcely discoverable [. . .] and assuredly not communicable but after a long and earnest discipline or [sic] silence and inward stillness’.185 As in his description (at the end of Lecture Four on Plato) of a Renaissance painting as representative of the inf luence of Plato’s thought, Coleridge portrays his sublime in black-and-white: ‘From no twilight, and amid no heraldry of multiform and many-coloured clouds, can this divine light be born for us’. ‘It’ — the Idea, the divine light, now synonymous — must divide itself from the darkness, on which a spirit higher than the individual soul hath descended and made pregnant; and as a birth, and the first day of a new creation, doth the soul contemplate it that doth indeed contemplate it.186

The echo is of the opening of Paradise Lost: ‘Thou from the first | Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread | Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss | And mad’st it pregnant’.187 As Milton’s addressee is the Holy Spirit, Coleridge’s allusion confirms that the impregnation of the Abyss is made by the Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity. Milton probably provides the only acceptable form of poetry for Coleridge at this point: since Paradise Lost, like the Opus, responds to (even exploits) the impossibility of describing that which is indescribable because it ‘surmounts the reach | Of human sense’.188 Blind Milton is enlisted as an ally against the despotism of the eye. For what T. S. Eliot disliked in Milton, that his ‘images do not give [the] sense of particularity [. . .]. I find, in reading Paradise Lost, that I am happiest where there is least to visualize’, Coleridge considered a virtue: in a lecture, Coleridge described Milton’s technique as the substitution of ‘a grand feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image’.189 Coleridge had previously used an unusual word to describe this quality of Milton’s verse: ‘Ideality’, which

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connotes (as Perry says) Coleridge’s celebration of ‘an inward creativity free from any dependence on external things or outward sense’.190 This describes as nearly as possible what Coleridge wanted for his Idea-grasping dialectic in the Opus. Coleridge continues with a further quotation adapted from Milton: These words, though authorized and sanctioned by the greatest, wisest, and best of the human race, will, I am but too well aware, appear to many ‘the f lights of a poet soaring in the high season of his fancies, with his garland and his singing robes about him, yet even for those that consent to sit below in the cool element of prose amongst readers of no empyreal conceit’, it must appear evident on the least actual ref lection that if ideas differ in kind from images, abstractions and generalizations, and are diverse and more than these, nothing less can be declared of them.191

McFarland thinks it most likely that by the greatest, wisest, and best of the human race Coleridge means Milton, but notes that it could be Plato:192 an exemplary confusion, in a sense, and the grammar does allow for either. The section in inverted commas, however, is definitely Milton (unidentified by the editor). In The Reason of Church Government Milton writes: For although a Poet soaring in the high region of his fancies with his garland and singing robes about him might without apology speak more of himself than I mean to do, yet for me sitting here below in the cool element of prose, a mortall thing among many readers of no Empyreall conceit, to venture and divulge unusual things of my selfe, I shall petition to the gentler sort, it may not be envy to me.193

The context of Coleridge’s sentence ref lects his ambivalence towards poetry in the Opus. In keeping with the predominantly ‘unliterary’ nature of his work, Coleridge alters the substance of the quotation. Whereas Milton elevates poetry as the highest form of writing, Coleridge’s meaning is that only the vulgar would regard his argument as the mere f lights of a poet. This downgrading of poetry may be ref lected in the alteration of a word. In The Friend Coleridge had misquoted the same passage (again unidentified by the editor), but with the word: ‘the high reason of his fancies’.194 To change this in the Opus to ‘season’ might suggest a desire to avoid linking reason with poetic fancy. It might also suggest something transient in poetic achievement; Coleridge himself, after all, liked to represent himself as having had a brief season as a poet. If Coleridge was dictating from memory, he could easily have made a slip — but it is striking that these different words occurred to him in different contexts. Significantly, the quotation of this passage in The Friend occurs in an essay in ‘On the Communication of Truth’, in the context of the anxiety about readers (discussed above). Coleridge associated Milton with the esoteric cultivation of ‘fit audience [. . .] though few’,195 which was precisely the enterprise of the Opus Maximum’s address to the ‘speculative intellect’. Even as he is explicitly downgrading poetry, then, Coleridge is ambitiously identifying himself with Milton, taking up the mantle of that sublime discourse of which Milton is a great exemplar. This self-identification with Milton also repeats, to some extent, a pattern more strongly evident in Biographia, where this gave him a platform from which to criticize a certain aspect of Wordsworth.196 In the Opus,

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Coleridge very stringently quotes Wordsworth’s ‘sense sublime | of something far more deeply interfused, | Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns’ as an example of the delusive pantheism to which piously intentioned poets can succumb:197 even though the quotation is not obviously visual, it represents in seductive form the despotism of the eye, since it ref lects (in Coleridge’s view) misplaced reverence for the visible world. There is some continuity here with Coleridge’s enumeration in Biographia of several characteristic faults of Wordsworth’s poetry, two of which involve over-enthusiastic engagement with objects in nature. First, Coleridge attacks Wordsworth’s ‘matter-of-fact-ness’, one aspect of which is his tendency to describe objects with ‘laborious minuteness’.198 Second, he reproves Wordsworth for ‘thoughts and images too great for the subject’, or ‘mental bombast’. Illustrating the latter criticism, Coleridge objects to Wordsworth’s lines in ‘Daffodils’, ‘They f lash upon that inward eye, | Which is the bliss of solitude!’, on the ground that the inward eye ought to have a worthier occupation than to behold images of f lowers; otherwise, ‘in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed “the bliss of solitude”?’199 In contrast to Wordsworth’s occasional confusion of inward with corporeal eye, Coleridge cites Milton, who speaks to the Imagination instead of to the Fancy, presenting ideals rather than representing particulars, ‘creation rather than painting’.200 (‘Painting’ seems here to carry a negative connotation of passive mimesis, similar to that in the Republic.) It is appropriate to Coleridge’s vocabulary in the Opus that Milton’s paradise was a place of ‘enormous bliss’:201 bliss being what Coleridge asserts as higher than — though legitimately linked to — intellectual kinds of happiness.202 The ‘true sublime’ of Milton, which in a lecture Coleridge had opposed to the ‘false sublime’ of Erasmus Darwin,203 becomes in the Opus a weapon against the pantheism not only of Wordsworth, but also of non-Christian religions. Coleridge takes the Bhagavad-Gita as an example (the work was relatively popular in England as a result of Charles Wilkins’s translation of 1785). He stigmatizes the Hindu poem by reversing the praise of Milton just quoted: like ‘all Indian poetry’ it attempts to ‘image the unimageable, not by symbols but by a jumble of Images helped out by words of number — a delirious fancy excludes all unifying Imagination’.204 The Bhagavad-Gita conveys a false sublime, based not on the evocation of infinity but rather the unfortunately concrete evocation of a large number of large things. The translator’s comparison of the work to Milton draws Coleridge’s retort: Milton!! [. . .] if there be one character of genius predominant in Milton it is this, that he never passes off bigness for greatness. Children never can make things big enough, and exactly so it is with the poets of India.205

Coleridge even links ‘Brahman Theology’ to atheism by quoting from Milton’s Samson Agonistes on the absurdity of atheists: he would have expected that regarding Brahman sensual pantheism, ‘of such doctrine never was there school, | But the heart of the fool’, were it not that such a religion does actually exist.206 Coleridge’s censorious attitude to the Sanskrit poem has an interesting parallel in Hegel, who contrasts the ‘affirmative sublime’, pantheistic and to be found in Indian poetry, with the ‘negative sublime’, an apprehension of the Absolute in which ‘the

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appearance falls short of the content’. The ‘negative sublime’ is negative with regard to particulars, and is to be found in Hebrew poetry: While therefore we found in the imagination of substantiality and its pantheism an infinite enlargement, here we have to marvel at the force of elevation of the mind which abandons everything in order to declare the exclusive power of God.207

This applies nicely to Coleridge’s contrast between the Bhagavad-Gita and Milton, and in general to the negative method of Coleridgean dialectic. I have already suggested that behind Coleridge’s invocations of Milton’s ‘authority’ lay a sense that his Opus was in some sense a similar endeavour to Milton’s epic. In a note about Paradise Lost made around 1818 or 1819, Coleridge seems to be ref lecting on his own situation as much as Milton’s: notwithstanding ‘an apparently unhappy choice in marriage’, he writes, Milton’s poetry shows him truly ‘susceptible of domestic enjoyments’. Milton was, as every truly great poet has been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendent ideal.208

This account of the genesis of Paradise Lost could pass for a f lattering view of the Opus. There are certainly similarities between the two works: both have free will as a central theme; both were composed by dictation; both are written in a style of extreme and unconventional complexity designed to defy the progress and regress of social language; both record a vision of hope in the face of overwhelming disappointment. The parallels should not be laboured, of course, given the obvious formal difference: Paradise Lost is poetry, the Opus Maximum prose, and a prose mostly resistant to the sweet baits of literature. Yet the general similarities between Coleridge and Milton did strike a contemporary: De Quincey comments that like Milton, ‘Coleridge, also, is a poet; Coleridge, also, was mixed up with the fervent politics of his age — an age how memorably ref lecting the revolutionary agitations of Milton’s age; Coleridge, also, was an extensive and brilliant scholar’.209 And when Coleridge expressed his hope that the Opus Maximum would bring him ‘Fame in the noblest sense of the word’, he invoked Milton again — this time the passage on fame in Lycidas.210 Since in this passage the noblest kind of fame is said to be ‘fame in heaven’, Coleridge’s allusion discloses the truly epic or Miltonic scale of his ambition. Finally, it is relevant that Coleridge saw Milton as enriching the world by ‘avenging himself ’ on it through Paradise Lost, given the weight of polemic in the Opus against ‘the prejudices of a rude and barbarous age’: the phrase ‘barbarous age’ again echoing Milton.211 I have lingered on Coleridge’s brief and paradoxically apologetic moments of Miltonic self-fashioning in the Opus, since they ref lect the fact that philosophy never fully banishes poetry from Coleridge’s writing. Coleridge implies that he is investigating Plato’s esoteric doctrines in the Opus — a deeper approach to Plato than that in The Friend where the ‘divine philosopher’ functions above all as a useful authority for Coleridgean esoteric concealment and postponement. Just as Plato would not commit his whole system to writing, however, so Coleridge’s

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‘dialectic’ invokes Ideas not by exhaustive propositions, but by means of the sublime poetic discourse that takes over when propositional language is exhausted. This is admittedly a limited readmission of poetic language to the quest for the Good. But did Socrates not say that although reason had banished the poets, he would readily accept any convincing defence made on behalf of poetry, and allow it to retake its place in the ideal republic, or soul?212 However ambivalently, the Opus plays out Coleridge’s earlier intuition that Plato and Milton belong together: ‘How little the Commentators of Milton have availed themselves of the writings of Plato | Milton’s Darling! [. . .] They thought little of Milton’s platonizing Spirit — who wrote nothing without an interior meaning’.213 Coleridge would have hoped that posterity would see in the purely ‘interior’ discourse of the Opus both an unfolding of the esoteric doctrines of Plato beginning from the Idea of Will, and the sublime f light of Milton above the reach of human sense. Notes to Chapter 5 1. 1833, quoted in Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church, p. 190. 2. Friend, i, 462–63n. 3. Assuming McFarland’s conjectural dating, which indicates that Coleridge dictated the majority of the Opus Maximum between 1820 and 1823 (see pp. 5, 80, 214, 291). 4. Opus, p. cxcvii. 5. Jerome Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 190. 6. Friend, i, 440. 7. CN iv, 4774 (1820–21). Cf. Friend, i, 427: ‘lest in uttering truth I should convey falsehood’. 8. Friend, i, 43. 9. As Coleridge emphasized in a letter: CL iv, 713. 10. Friend, i, 21. Cf. BL, i, 59. 11. Friend, i, 20; cf. Christensen, pp. 205 f. 12. Gorgias 465b–466a; ‘cookery is to medicine, as rhetoric to justice’ (465c). 13. Newlyn criticizes these essays in Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception, esp. p. 58, noting the ‘explicitly gendered tenor’ of Coleridge’s distinction between his own ‘masculine’ style and the feeble popular style. A further context for Coleridge’s strictures on style is his nostalgia for the prestigious university context of academic debate in the seventeenth century, which had gradually given way to the salon-culture of the eighteenth century: see Hedley, pp. 272–79. 14. Friend, i, 51. 15. Friend, i, 19, 31, 39, 45. 16. CL iv, 546. 17. Friend, i, 20. The Friend, began as a weekly periodical in 1809. 18. Friend, i, 23. 19. Timaeus 69d: ‘pleasure [. . .] is the greatest bait [δέλεαρ] to evil’. 20. Friend, i, 35; cf. LS, p. 131. 21. Friend, i, 488. 22. James Hutchison Stirling, ‘De Quincey and Coleridge upon Kant’, in Jerrold, Tennyson and Macaulay with Other Critical Essays (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1868), pp. 172–224 (p. 194). 23. My account focuses on Coleridge’s use of Plato. For an even-handed exposition of the Method essays and their centrality to Coleridge’s criticism, see J. R. de J. Jackson, Method and Imagination in Coleridge’s Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). On the literary critical background, see Paul K. Alkon, ‘Critical and Logical Concepts of Method from Addison to Coleridge’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 5.1 (1971), 97–121. 24. Friend, i, 448. The letter is addressed not (as Coleridge says) to Dion, but to Dionysius, and is now considered inauthentic.

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25. Friend, i, 457; Meno 82b–85b. 26. L. Oening-Hanhoff, ‘Methode’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. by Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, and Gottfried Gabriel, 13 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch­gesell­ schaft, 1971–2004), v, 1304–05. 27. Philebus 16c. 28. Phaedrus 265d–277c. 29. Neal W. Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 4. 30. Friend, i, 441. Cf. Tennemann i, 399. 31. Esp. Tennemann i, 354–57, much of which Coleridge paraphrased; Tennemann admits Plato’s bias (p. 351) but considers that his dialogues differentiate the personalities of the Sophists sufficiently to be convincing portrayals (p. 353). 32. Friend, i, 443, based on Tennemann’s extensive paraphrase (I, 400–01). 33. Friend, i, 443. McFarland emphasizes Coleridge’s opposition to Epicurean ethics ancient and modern (Opus, pp. xliv–liii). 34. Friend, i, 445. The 1809 Friend had been published as a periodical. 35. Ibid. 36. Aids, p. 92. Cf. the passages on Will, time, and evil, which Lovejoy collects from Aids: ‘Coleridge and Kant’s Two Worlds’, pp. 266–67. 37. The salient Greek passage in the Bipont Edition reads: ἀλλὰ ποῖόν τι μὴν τοῦτ’ ἐστίν, ῶ παῖ Διονυσίου και Δωρίδος, τὸ ἐρωτημα, ὃ πάντων αἰτιόν ἐστι κακῶν; μᾶλλον δὲ ἡ περὶ τούτου ὠδίς (xi, 69). Coleridge probably read it here, since the passage is not quoted by Tennemann. Modern editions replace the question mark (;) after ‘κακῶν’ with a comma (,), which clarifies the meaning; but Coleridge would also have seen Ficino’s translation on the same page, ‘[. . .] & quae malorum omnium causa?’ For Taylor’s translation of this passage, see p. 32 n. 39 above. 38. Tennemann ii, 217. 39. Friend, i, 445–46. 40. Friend, i, 459. 41. Friend, i, 459–60. 42. Friend, i, 460. 43. Tennemann ii, 220. 44. Friend, i, 461. 45. Friend, i, 461. 46. Joseph Warren Beach (The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966; first published 1936), pp. 320–21) thinks Coleridge’s formula ‘almost literally’ renders the following words of Kant: ‘so siehet man wol, der eigenthümliche Grundsatz der Vernunft überhaupt (im logischen Gebrauche) sey: zu dem bedingten Erkenntnisse des Verstandes das Unbedingte zu finden, womit die Einheit desselben vollendet wird’ (‘we see very well that the proper principle of reason in general (in its logical use) is to find the unconditioned for conditioned cognitions of the understanding, with which its unity will be completed’), Critique of Pure Reason, B364. Orsini (p. 52) endorses this source. However, there are many references to the unconditioned in Kant’s ‘Transcendental Dialectic’, e.g. B436 which could equally well count as a ‘source’. Another plausible passage on the unconditioned is Critique of the Power of Judgment, §76, a passage very popular with the post-Kantians, who employed the notion of the ‘unconditioned’ much more than did Kant himself. This is an example of how precise source-hunting is an ever-tempting but sometimes unhelpful approach to Coleridge: Beach’s certainty springs from his assumption of ‘Coleridge’s inaccuracy and his extreme want of candor in giving credit for his ideas’ (p. 321). I agree that Coleridge’s esoteric method is sometimes inaccurate, and uncandid in the sense of (often ostentatiously) concealing ideas and sources; but in this case the abundance of plausible sources suggests instead a composite memory of several passages, perhaps prompted by the Tennemann passage I quoted above. 47. Cf. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, p. 37. 48. See e.g. Critique of Pure Reason, B241. 49. BL i, 303. 50. Cf. Chapter 2, above. 51. Friend, i, 462.

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52. Friend, i, 462 (n.). 53. Friend, i, 472. As Gregory says, ‘By identifying Plato’s project with his own, Coleridge is doing more than stealing a little ancient authority for himself, he is laying claim to a continuous and unifying philosophical project’ (Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination, p. 92). 54. Friend, i, 472. 55. Friend, i, 454. 56. Coleridge refers again to Plato’s ‘poetic drapery’ in Opus, p. 196. 57. Friend, i, 462. Beach remarks the close similarity of Schelling’s phrase, ‘die Uebereinstimmung der Natur mit den Maximen unserer ref lectierenden Vernunft’ [the correspondence (or coincidence) of nature with the maxims of our ref lective reason], noting the reliance of the ‘Essays on Method’ on concepts from the Naturphilosophie of Schelling and Steffens: The notion of the relations of objects as ‘pre-determined by a truth originating in the mind,’ is inherent in the whole of Schelling’s ‘Naturphilosophie,’ and derives from the central, the radical place in his transcendental system, of self-consciousness (Selbstbewusstseyn) from which, as a starting point, he proceeds to deduce, a priori, his ‘construction of matter.’ Further similarities are seen in Schelling’s belief in the value of system, antipathy to mere hypothesis, and faith in speculative physics (Beach, p. 323; see further pp. 332–33 and nn.). 58. Friend, i, 463. Talking of the ancients, Coleridge is probably thinking of the moderns again: cf. Phil. Lects. ii, 469: During the whole of the Middle Ages and almost down to the time of the Restoration of Charles II we discover everywhere metaphysics, always acute and frequently profound, but throughout estranged from, not merely experimental physics generally, but from its most intimate connective, experimental psychology; while from the Restoration we have the opposite extreme, namely experimental physics and a truly enlightened though empirical [and mechanical] psychology, estranged from and in utter contempt of all metaphysics. 59. Friend, i, 463. 60. Opus, p. 164. 61. CL ii, 947. 62. Friend, i, 482. 63. Friend, i, 482. 64. Quoted in Emil Wolff, Francis Bacon und seine Quellen (Berlin: Ferber, 1910), p. 81. For Coleridge on idols, see p. 42, above. 65. Albeit with the major reservation that Plato divorced the Ideas from physical reality: see Wolff, esp. pp. 129–47. In Bacon’s Novum Organum there is a possible allusion to Phaedrus 265d, the locus classicus for Platonic method (Wolff, pp. 144–45). Wolff reviews Bacon’s extensive debt to Plato and, whilst noting the basic difference between Bacon’s ‘Forms’ as dependent on sense-experience and Plato’s Ideas as independent (p. 139), states in strikingly Coleridgean terms: ‘Die Methode Bacons ist so keine andere als die platonische [. . .] Zusammenfassung des Gemeinsamen und Aussonderung des Verschiedenen: das sind die Grundprinzipien platonischer und baconischer Methode’ [Bacon’s method is none other than the Platonic [. . .] bringing together of the common and picking out of the different: these are the basic principles of Platonic and Baconic method] (p. 143). Nevertheless Bacon differs fundamentally from Plato in seeking mastery (‘Beherrschung’) of the object of knowledge where Plato seeks intuition (‘Anschauung’), and Bacon was far from penetrating the mathematical and metaphysical depths of Plato (pp. 157–58). See also F. H. Anderson, ‘Bacon on Platonism’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 11 (1941–42), 154–66. 66. Quoted in Wolff, p. 8. Cf. Bacon’s approving reference to ‘Plato’s opinion, that all knowledge is but remembrance’ (Wolff, p. 1). 67. Friend, i, 491; also Phil. Lects ii, 486. Cf. Phil. Lects. ii, 488: This therefore is the true Baconic philosophy. It consists in this, a profound meditation

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on those laws which the pure reason in man reveals to him, with the confident anticipation and faith that to this will be found to correspond certain laws in nature. 68. Friend, i, 472. 69. Cf. CN, ii, 2372. 70. Friend, i, 513. 71. ‘The Divine Ideas in Coleridge’s Opus Maximum: The Rhetoric of the Indemonstrable’, Coleridge Bulletin, 22 (Winter 2003), 39–47 (p. 39). 72. Friend, i, 508. 73. Friend, i, 509. 74. Opus, p. 104. 75. Friend, i, 509. Cf. ‘On Poesy or Art’, discussed on p. 73 above. 76. Friend, i, 511. 77. Friend, i, 509–10, lines 77–84, 131–70 of the poem as printed in Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems, ed. by Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 269–77. 78. Friend, i, 510; BL ii, 147, discussed on p. 41 above. 79. The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. by Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), p. 61; John D. Rea, ‘Coleridge’s Intimations of Immortality from Proclus’, Modern Philology, 26 (November 1928), 201–13. 80. Friend, i, 495; ‘Ode’, line 155. 81. Line 40; Friend, i, 40. 82. Lines 151–55. 83. Friend, i, 514. 84. Friend, i, 512. The quotation is from Matthew 6. 22. 85. Friend, i, 514. 86. Evans, ‘Divine Ideas’, p. 41. 87. Friend, i, 511, n. 3. 88. Friend, i, 519–20. 89. Friend, i, 516. 90. Friend, i, 523–24. 91. Friend, i, 519. 92. Friend, i, 516. 93. Lines 58–59. 94. Friend, i, 514–16. 95. Friend, i, 516. 96. Coleridge’s theoretical objection to the design argument is most concisely expressed in Table Talk (I, 462–63): Assume the existence of God — and then the harmony and fitness of the physical creation may be shown to correspond with and support such an assumption; but to set about proving the existence of a God by such means is a mere circle — a delusion. Ben Brice, Coleridge and Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) probes the intel­ lectual background to Coleridge’s responses to the design argument. 97. Opus, p. 103. 98. Cf. Richard Tomlinson, ‘Pivotal Points in Coleridge’s Opus Maximum’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 130 (April 2005), 43–55 (p. 55). 99. CL v, 28. 100. CN, iv, 4744 (November 1820) records this gift. Coburn’s note identifies the work as Procli Successoris Platonici in Platonis theologiam libri sex, ed. with Latin tr. by Aemilius Portus. With Marinus’s life of Proclus, Pico della Mirandola’s Conclusiones LV secundum Proclum and Proclus’s Institutio theologica (Hamburg, 1618). 101. H. J. Jackson, ‘Coleridge’s Collaborator, Joseph Henry Green’, Studies in Romanticism 21.2 (1982), 161–79 (p. 167). Jackson notes that Green was also perhaps Coleridge’s main source of German books, as the Sotheby catalogue of the sale of Green’s library in 1880 suggests (p. 173). 102. Opus, pp. 22, 241, 222.

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103. CN, iv, 4744. Coleridge gives Proclus’s Greek; I quote Taylor’s translation, TTS viii, 53. 104. CN, iv, 4744. 105. Opus, p. 47n. Plato uses the word προπαιδεία (Republic 536d). 106. Cf. Coleridge’s reference to ‘a That which is not but which is for ever only about to be’: Opus, p. 217. 107. CL vi, 966–67, quoted in Opus, p. cxlvi. 108. Introduction to J. H. Green, Spiritual Philosophy: Founded on the Teaching of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1865), i, p. xxxviii; quoted in Opus, p. clvi. 109. ‘Athenäumsfragment’ no. 53, quoted and discussed in Franziska Schmitt, Method in the Fragments: Fragmentarische Strategien in der englischen und deutschen Romantik (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2005), pp. 44–45, who offers a valuable treatment of Coleridge in the same light (pp. 125–70). 110. David Simpson, ‘Transcendental Philosophy and Romantic Criticism’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, v: Romanticism, ed. by Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 72–91 (p. 89 n. 30). As a more modestly presented reading text, there is much to be said for Richard S. Tomlinson’s edition of the Opus Maximum (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2003). 111. Opus, pp. lxxviii, lxxix. 112. Opus, pp. clviii, clix. 113. Opus, pp. clxxxii, cxcv. 114. Coleridge explicitly avoids quoting Scripture as ‘authority’ (Opus, pp. 88; 200–01). The reason is clear from Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (1822): he fears that this would imply the popular but disastrous notion that the Bible was dictated by a ‘superhuman [. . .] Ventriloquist’ (SWF, ii, 1111–71, pp. 1136, 1149). 115. Opus, p. clxiv. Elinor Shaffer points out McFarland’s neoconservative agenda in editing the Opus Maximum: ‘Biblical Criticism and “Darwinism” in Coleridge’s Opus Maximum’, in A View in the Rear-Mirror: Romantic Aesthetics, Culture and Science Seen from Today, ed. by Walter Pape (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006), pp. 161–74. 116. Opus, p. clxvi; and cf. the similar discussion in Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, pp. 366–77. Perhaps McFarland is revising his view from Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. There he states plausibly that one may ‘differentiate the role of Plato from that of Kant by saying that, though both served as prolegomena to the true system, Plato served the heart and Kant the head’ (p. 212). 117. Opus, p. clxvi. 118. Friend, i, 461. 119. Opus, pp. 42, 58. On the development of Coleridge’s view of the Kantian moral law, cf. pp. 46–47, above. 120. Opus, p. 74. 121. Opus, p. 75. 122. Opus, pp. 75–76. 123. Opus, p. 76. 124. Opus, pp. 232–33. Cf. Coleridge’s definition of the Spirit as ‘the act in which the Father and the Son are One [. . .] the Copula by which both are one and the Copula one with them’ (pp. 209–10). 125. For a clear account of the Trinity in (especially) the Opus see James D. Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 127–42. Boulger, however, downplays an esoteric point, that Coleridge asserts a ‘ground [. . .] that is not to be called God’ beyond the Trinity: ‘the abysmal depth’ which ‘begetteth not’ — related to Böhme’s concept of Ungrund (Opus, pp. 232, 195 and n. 335). For a fuller discussion than mine of Coleridge’s Platonism as preparation for his Trinitarianism, see McFarland, ‘The Trinitarian Resolution’, chapter 4 of Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (pp. 191–255). 126. Opus, p. 189. 127. Opus, p. 236. 128. Opus, p. 237. 129. Opus, p. 238. For a critical account see Laurence S. Lockridge, ‘The Abyss of Will’, in his

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Coleridge the Moralist (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 53–77. 130. Opus, p. 247. 131. Opus, p. 241. Cf. Hedley, pp. 248–63, and Lovejoy, ‘Coleridge and Kant’s Two Worlds’, pp. 268–69. On the very personal belief in original sin as the ‘ground of Coleridge’s religious sensibility’, see McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, pp. 224, 233–34. 132. Opus, pp. 119–27. McFarland regards this as the ‘philosophical fulcrum’ of the Opus, comparing the ‘Infant Babe’ sequence of the Prelude (pp. cxxxv–cxlii). 133. Timaeus 27d5–28a1. It was Augustine who linked Plato’s affinity to Christianity to the name of God at Exodus 3. 14, writing: ‘ “HE WHO IS” implies that in comparison with him who really is, because he is unchangeable, the things created changeable have no real existence. This truth Plato vigorously maintained and diligently taught’. Thus arose a patristic tradition, which Cudworth was following when he derived the Platonic idea of being from Exodus 3. 14 and proved this with Timaeus 27d5–28a1 (Hedley, p. 77; Cudworth, i, 572). For references to Coleridge’s other discussions of Exodus 3.14, see CN iv, 4644n. Perkins sees this passage as central to Coleridge’s theory of the Logos (Coleridge’s Philosophy, pp. 45–46). 134. Laws 732a (also cited by Hedley, pp. 258–59). 135. Opus, pp. 248–51; cf. 261–62. 136. Opus, p. 252. The one citation of Plato that Coleridge does give in support of this interpretation is his ‘positive assertion of a distinctness of the Good as well as of the Intelligent from the Absolute Source’. This sounds like a reference to Republic 509b, where Socrates states that the Good is beyond Being in dignity; Coleridge may have rediscovered it in Proclus, Platonic Theology (TTS viii, 145), where Proclus maintains the strict transcendence of Plato’s One/Good. This probably connects with Coleridge’s insistence on an impersonal ‘Ground’ logically prior to God the Father, which he regards as necessary to the possibility of a Trinity of equal relations. The Neoplatonists, on the other hand, ‘established their first principle, their absolutum primum, in the idea of the Good’, and asserted the emanation of nous and psyche therefrom (Opus, pp. 252–53). Coleridge knew Cudworth’s belief that Plato’s Trinity was corrupted by the later Platonists (Cudworth, i, 557), and his account of their subordinationism (i, 580–90). 137. Opus, p. 190. 138. Phil. Lects. i, 320–21. 139. Opus, pp. 39–40. Kant explicitly argues that a basic opposition exists between Epicureanism and Platonism: both claim too much on the basis of speculative reason, though Platonism is superior in providing excellent practical (i.e. moral) principles (Critique of Pure Reason, B500). 140. Opus, pp. 46–47. 141. Opus, pp. 47–48. 142. Timaeus 70e. 143. See Hedley, pp. 248–63. On Coleridge’s subtle Auseinandersetzung with this work in Aids, see Elinor Shaffer, ‘Metaphysics of Culture: Kant and Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 31.2 (1970), 199–218. Shaffer has recently updated this article to take account of the recently published fifth volume of Coleridge’s Notebooks: ‘Coleridge and Kant’s “Giant Hand” ’, in Anglo-German Affinities and Antipathies, ed. by Rüdiger Görner (Munich: Iudicium, 2004), pp. 39–56. 144. Opus, p. 47. 145. Phil. Lects. i, 146–48. 146. Phil. Lects. i, 148. 147. Phil. Lects. i, 149; 265–77 (Lecture 6). In another note in the Opus Coleridge suggests that a further result of Socrates’ ‘unsteadiness’ was that Plotinus retained a heteronomous sense of ‘the Useful or Advantageous’ in his concept of the Good (Opus, pp. 255–56 and n.). Coleridge states that ‘this great, good man’ did try to ‘rise into a purer idea’ of the Good: Coleridge is clearly referring here to Socrates, not (contra McFarland) Plotinus. 148. Phil. Lects. i, 277. 149. Phil. Lects. i, 283. 150. Phil. Lects. i, 285. 151. Phil. Lects. i, 285. 152. He presses the point in his letter to Green, CN iv, 791–92.

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153. Graham Davidson explores this tension in ‘Duty and Power: Conf licts of the Will in Coleridge’s Creation of the Self ’, in Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion: Essays on the ‘Opus Maximum’, ed. by Jeffrey W. Barbeau (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), pp. 121–44. 154. CN iv, 5215 (1825). 155. Opus, pp. 33–34. Elinor Shaffer discusses this passage in detail in ‘Iago’s Malignity Motivated: Coleridge’s Unpublished “Opus Maximum” ’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 19 (1968), 195–203. 156. Friend, i, 523. 157. Opus, pp. 103–04. 158. Opus, p. 103. 159. Opus, p. 264. 160. Opus, p. 265. 161. CL iii, 481 (April 1814). 162. Opus, p. 123. 163. Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism, p. 142. 164. Opus, p. 291 (n. 1). For a discussion of rhetorical tradition in relation to this point, see Wayne C. Anderson, ‘ “Perpetual Affirmations, Unexplained”: The Rhetoric of Reiteration in Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 71 (1985), 37–51. 165. Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania University Press, 1980), pp. 18–21. 166. Opus, p. 196; Philip Merlan, ‘The Old Academy’, in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. by A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, reprinted 1995), p. 37. Cf. A. Müller, ‘Dialektik’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, iii, 164–75. 167. ‘Dialectic [. . .] is the method of philosophizing. It is certainly undeniable that Plato bestows a high worth on it, because he treats it not as a canon, but as the organ of reason’ (‘Dialektik [. . .] ist die Methode des Philosophirens. Es ist zwar nicht zu läugnen, daß ihr Plato einen hohen Werth beilegt, weil er sie nicht als einen Kanon, sondern als Organon der Vernunft betrachtet’): Tennemann ii, 276. 168. Opus, p. 184. 169. Republic 511b–c. 170. BL i, 107; Opus, p. 85. 171. Opus, p. 183. 172. Opus, pp. 183–84. The same terminology appears in BL i, 107. 173. Opus, p. 184. 174. Opus, p. 185; cf. p. 19: without the Idea of Will ‘as the ground or inceptive position, a system of Philosophy [. . .] as distinct from mere history and empirical classification, would be im­possible’. 175. BL i, 141. 176. CL II 866, 10 Sept 1802. To link these dialogues was traditional: Proclus cites Iamblichus as saying that ‘the whole theory of Plato’ is comprised in these dialogues, of ‘sensibles’ in Timaeus and ‘intelligibles’ in Parmenides (Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato, TTS XV, 22; cf. 85). 177. Cf. Timaeus 38a–b: the terms it was and it will be, which express the species of generated time, are transferred by us to an eternal essence, through oblivion of the truth [. . .] according to truth the term it is is alone accommodated to its nature. 178. Opus, p. 196. 179. Opus, p. 196. 180. Though a later nineteenth-century commentator felt similarly to Coleridge: ‘in Plato’s highly poetical and allegorical exposition a logical analysis is represented as a process taking place in time, and to reach his true meaning we must strip off the veil of imagery’ (The Timaeus of Plato, ed. by R. D. Archer-Hind (London: Macmillan, 1888), p. 86 (n.14)). 181. Timaeus 41d. 182. Opus, p. 80; Paradise Lost, book VIII, lines 640–41. I quote from Paradise Lost, ed. by Alastair Fowler (Essex: Longman 1998).

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183. LL ii, 426. 184. Opus, p. 197. 185. Opus, pp. 96–97. In CN iv, 4746, Coleridge notes a similar passage of Proclus on the ascent to Theology, ‘beginning with purity as the absence of evil’. He intends to use this for the Opus, but is sceptical of Proclus’ ‘peculiar doctrines [. . .] fantastic and grotesque, in subjects within ordinary comprehension’. 186. Opus, p. 197. 187. Paradise Lost, Book i, lines 19–22. 188. Paradise Lost, Book v, lines 571–72. 189. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), pp. 40, 143; Coleridge, LL i, 311. 190. LL i, 145. Perry, Division, p. 215. 191. Opus, pp. 197–98. 192. Opus, p. 197 (n. 348). 193. The Prose of John Milton, ed. by J. Max Patrick and others (New York: Doubleday), pp. 107–08. 194. Friend, i, 44 (italics added). However, in two manuscripts of The Friend, the word is ‘region’ (ibid., n. 2) — as indeed appears in Thomas Birch’s edition of Milton’s prose (1738), which Coleridge annotated in 1808. 195. Paradise Lost, Book VII, line 31; BL ii, 147; cf. CN iii, 3678. 196. See Raimonda Modiano, ‘Coleridge and Milton: The Case against Wordsworth in the Biographia Literaria’, in Coleridge’s ‘Biographia Literaria’: Text and Meaning, ed. by Frederick Burwick (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), pp. 150–70, though Modiano’s view that the Biographia uses Milton to mount a ‘vicious attack’ on Wordsworth is overstated. 197. Opus, p. 113, quoting ‘Tintern Abbey’, lines 93–94. Coleridge comments further on pantheism in Opus, pp. 206–07. 198. BL ii, 126. 199. BL ii, 136–37, quoting ‘I wandered lonely [. . .]’, lines 21–22. 200. BL ii, 128. 201. Paradise Lost, Book v, line 297. 202. Opus, p. 47, in the note on Kant (discussed above, pp. 146–48). 203. LL i, 401. 204. Opus, p. 394. 205. Opus, p. 281. 206. Opus, p. 276, quoting Samson Agonistes, lines 297–99, which draw in turn on Psalm 14. 1. 207. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. by T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), i, 375, quoted in Stephen Bygrave, Coleridge and the Self: Romantic Egotism (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 59. 208. Coleridge’s Writings, v: On the Sublime, ed. by David Vallins (New York: Palgrave, 2003), p. 96. 209. De Quincey, Works, XV, 106. 210. CL v, 28 (30 March 1820), referring to Lycidas, lines 64–84. 211. Opus, p. 115 (and n.135): in his prefatory note on ‘ THE VERSE’, Milton calls rhyme ‘the in­vention of a barbarous age’. 212. Republic 607d. 213. CL, ii, 459 (10 September 1802). See further Elizabeth T. McLaughlin, ‘Coleridge and Milton’, Studies in Philology, 61 (1964), 545–72 (p. 552).

Conclusion v

Coleridge drew repeatedly on Plato’s Socratic dialogues for figures of poetic inspiration, and on later Platonic works for metaphysical thoughts on the nature of Ideas. My analysis of Coleridge’s philosophical writing has challenged Orsini’s belief that ‘it is precisely on Plato that Coleridge is least satisfactory’. Chapter 1 reviewed Coleridge’s earlier comments on Plato, showing that, contrary to a common assumption, Coleridge did consider it important to distinguish Plato from Neoplatonism, even if he did not always succeed in doing so. This desire to reach ‘the Source’ ref lected a new tendency among contemporary commentators; but Coleridge was distinctive in his intuitive sympathy with Plato, his sense that he had read Plato ‘by anticipation’. In Chapter 2, I considered how Coleridge links Plato with Kant. Coleridge has often been attacked for his distortion of the Kantian thought he mediated. I suggested, however, that this was due partly to unfavourable conditions in England at that time, and partly to the continuing dispute among the post-Kantians — who often invoked Plato in their arguments — about the fundamental principles of the Critical philosophy. Coleridge in parti­ cular sought to Platonize Kant’s account of Ideas. Whereas Kant held them to have regulative status only, for Coleridge’s Plato they are constitutive, living powers that actively inform the mind. This disagreement has a considerable implication for the writing of philosophy. Kant attacked those writers as lazy and unphilosophical who, following Plato, poetically evoked a direct intuition of the ideal realm. The double-minded Coleridge was divided between the prosaic rigour of Kant and the ‘visionary f lights’ of Plato; but I pointed out in Chapter 3 that this ambivalence also appears in Plato’s dialogues themselves. I discussed echoes of the Republic’s ‘ancient quarrel’ between poetry and philosophy in Coleridge, notably his unease about the passivity of mimetic art. A long tradition, however, had looked to Plato’s Demiurge as embodying a ‘higher’ model of mimesis, imitating not the phenomenal world but the Ideas; and Coleridge often conceives of poetic creativity in these terms. Further, I argued that the ambivalence of Coleridge’s attitude to poetic inspiration — as divine, yet passive and requiring rational scrutiny — is strongly reminiscent of Plato. Important for much of the foregoing argument is the fact (now widely acknowledged among critics) that Coleridge invariably wrote — or talked — with an audience in mind. Platonic Coleridge does not present propositions to be accepted or refuted, but aims to provoke a change in the reader’s consciousness. He regards the ‘reading public’, however, as unprepared for a discourse of Ideas. The importance of the distinction which, following Tennemann, Coleridge draws between Plato’s esoteric and exoteric doctrines lies in the fact that this ref lects Coleridge’s own practice. In Chapter 4, I compared the public Lectures On the History

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of Philosophy with the marginalia to Tennemann: the latter, written for the eyes of J. H. Green only, explores certain esoteric topics only glanced at in the lectures. Superficially, the esoteric–exoteric distinction manifests itself as another version of the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. That is, Coleridge appears to follow Tennemann’s suggestion that although the Platonic dialogues are artistically perfect, they are no more than preparatory to the true ‘system’ that remained unwritten. Coleridge accordingly speculated on the possibility of reconstructing the esoteric ‘system’ by sifting the reports of Plato’s students. Yet at the end of Lecture Four he hints that it is not so much through technical reconstructions as through imaginative art, after all, that the Platonic esoteric is to be glimpsed. The esoteric, instead of a systematic network of propositions, designates an ascent to the active contemplation of Ideas, stimulated and expressed by the sublime in music, painting, and poetry. I pursued this suggestion further in Chapter 5, which began from the anxiety of reception implicit in the maintenance of an esoteric doctrine. I contrasted the Essays on Method in the 1818 Friend with the Opus Maximum — the former a published, exoteric work, the latter unpublished, esoteric. In The Friend Coleridge invokes Plato’s authority to truncate the investigation into the Ground of philosophical method as unsuitable for the reading public. In the Opus Maximum, free from this anxiety of reception (as in the Tennemann marginalia), Coleridge at last dispenses with such evasions, and freely investigates the supposed territory of Plato’s esoterica, beginning from the Idea of Will, encompassing the origin of evil, and attempting an a priori exposition of the Trinity. The Opus Maximum attains greater continuity than a more self-consciously ‘literary’ work such as The Friend; but it too falls short of a complete ‘system’. Once again, Coleridge turns at crucial points to a poetic discourse of the sublime, represented by Milton. I hope that the three key concepts used in this book — the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy; the esoteric–exoteric distinction; and the anxiety of reception — have implied some anticipations of the directions further studies of Coleridge’s philosophical writing might take. First, rather than deplore Coleridge’s vacillation between the vocations of poet and philosopher, it would be worthwhile to investigate further the part his thought has played in mediating and complicating the distinction between literary and philosophical writing — a distinction whose ultimate source in western thought, I have suggested, lies in Plato. Second, given the conceptual reticence of Coleridge’s published work, the recipients of his ‘esoterica’ deserve more attention, especially J. H. Green, J. C. Hare, and John Sterling. The recent publication of the Opus Maximum and the fifth Notebook enables greater insight than has ever before been possible into what the Highgate circle heard from ‘the good old man, | Most eloquent, who spake of things divine’ (Arthur Hallam). The newly arisen material revitalizes the private voice of Coleridge, and suggests the extent to which the older no less than the younger Coleridge attempted to inf luence ‘the whole’ lives of those he instructed: a very Platonic, or rather Socratic, ambition.1 Coleridge, without being a noteworthy textual scholar of Plato, bequeathed a living interest in Plato and Platonism to a significant minority of the younger generation, through his discourses which (thought de’ Prati) ‘cannot be better compared than with the dialogues of Plato’.

Conclusion

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Note to the Conclusion 1. For an aspect of Coleridge’s pedagogy, see James Vigus, ‘Teach-Yourself Guides to the Literary Life, 1817–25: Coleridge, De Quincey, and Lamb’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 140 (October 2007), 152–66.

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index ❖

Adorno, Theodor 42-43 Akenside, Mark 83-84 Allston, Washington 1-2, 52 anamnesis 3, 29-30, 41, 55, 58 n. 51, 81, 83, 87, 100-01, 118, 128, 133-40, 152-53 antinomies of reason 43-45, 50, 104, 110-11, 152 Anaxagoras 99 anticipation 3, 23-30, 65, 95-101, 103, 106, 129, 131, 136, 146, 160-61 n. 67, 167 Anti-Jacobin Review 37 a priori 30, 40-41, 46, 54, 55, 58 nn. 44, 50 & 51, 128, 133, 142, 144, 160 n. 57, 168 Aristocles 132 Aristotle 5, 18, 47, 53, 55, 70, 86, 104-05, 106, 113, 132, 149 Arnold, Matthew 64 Ashton, Rosemary 39, 58 n. 44 Augustine, Saint 30, 106, 163 n. 133 Bacon, Francis 97, 113, 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 135-36, 160 nn. 65 & 67 Barfield, Owen, 2, 94, 123 n. 142 Bate, W. J. 33 n. 77, 82, 93-94 beauty 28, 30, 51-53, 58 n. 43, 71, 73-74, 77, 101 see also Ideas Beddoes, Thomas 37 Beer, John 33 nn. 75 & 83 Berg, Franz 123 n. 139 Berkeley, George 13, 99, 152 Berkeley, Richard 9, 58 n. 29 Beiser, Frederick 40, 42, 49-50, 59 n. 55, 60 n. 105 Bhagavad-Gita 156-57 Bible 25, 26, 80-81, 153 see also Exodus Böhme, Jakob 22, 81, 91 n. 135, 97, 115, 162 n. 125 Brice, Ben 61 n. 116, 161 n. 96 Brown, Thomas 39 Browning, Robert 82 Brucker, Jacob 16, 47, 94, 101-02, 119 n. 6, 122 n. 112, 123 n. 149 Bruno, Giordano 97, 98 Bunyan, John 112-13 Burwick, Frederick 80, 90 n. 91, n. 92 Carlyle, Thomas 2, 55 Cassirer, Ernst 6, 53 Christ 94, 96-99, 100, 106-07, 118, 122 nn. 105 & 148

Christensen, Jerome 126 Coburn, Kathleen 33 n. 90, 91 n. 108, 93, 94, 102, 114 Coleridge, E. H. 114 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Aids to Reflection 5, 9, 10, 43, 46, 125, 130, 159 n. 36, 163 n. 143 Biographia Literaria 1, 4, 10, 24, 26, 38-41, 46, 51, 56, 60 n. 88, 64, 70, 71, 79, 87-88 n. 12, 95, 113-15, 118, 124, 125, 133, 137, 140, 151, 152, 155-56, 165 n. 196 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit 24, 80, 162 n. 114 On the Constitution of the Church and State 143 ‘Dejection: An Ode’ 22, 42, 64, 137 ‘The Destiny of Nations’ 92 n. 146 Friend, The 7, 30, 43, 59 nn. 55 & 79, 74, 88 n. 35, 91 n. 129, 96-97, 103, 105, 112, 121 n. 86, 122 n. 95, 123 n. 126, 125-40, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 168 ‘Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouny’ 139 ‘Kubla Khan’ 4, 7, 10, 67, 80, 82-87, 92 n. 168, 100, 118 Lectures 1795: 20-21, 37, 83-84 Lectures on the History of Philosophy 4, 5, 20, 77, 87, 93-118, 121 nn. 74, 75, 81 & 86, 125, 146-49, 151, 153, 160 n. 58, 167-68 Logic 38, 43, 44, 56, 58 n. 29, 103-04, 141 ‘Night-Scene: A Dramatic Fragment, The’ 83 Opus Maximum 4, 6, 10, 46, 64, 74, 125-26, 128, 130, 132, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140-56, 162 nn. 115 & 125, 163 nn. 136 & 147, 164 n. 174, 165 n. 185, 168 ‘On Poesy or Art’ 10, 73 plagiarism (alleged) 2-3, 24, 33 n. 77, 58 n. 29, 93 Principles of Genial Criticism 10, 52-53, 56, 71 reading of Plato 23-30, 88 n. 35, 121 nn. 74, 75 & 81, 152 Statesman’s Manual 47 Table Talk 10, 23-24, 33 n. 71, 119 n. 26, 161 n. 96 Coleridge, Sara 39 Collins, William 81 Cooper, Gilbert 19, 32 n. 46 Cudworth, Ralph 18, 22, 26, 74, 86, 90 n. 89, 101, 122 n. 112, 131, 163 nn. 133 & 136 Cyclopaedia, see Rees, Abraham

186

Index

Darwin, Erasmus 68, 156 Demiurge 18-19, 66, 67, 70-73, 82-87, 153, 167 see also Plato, Timaeus Democritus 99, 135 De Paolo 132 n. 30, 60 n. 91, 113-14 De Quincey, Thomas 25, 36, 38, 44, 91 n. 135, 124 n. 169, 157 dialectic 6, 7, 35, 44, 48, 78, 87-88 n. 12, 88 n. 28, 103-04, 109 , 151-52, 155, 157-58, 164 n. 167 see also Kant, Transcendental Dialectic Drummond, William 40 Dyer, George 14, 17 Edwards, Pamela 2 Eliot, T. S. 64, 154 Emerson, Mary Moody 2 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 29, 137 Encyclopaedia Britannica 16 Encyclopaedia Metropolitana 98 Enfield, William 16, 31 nn. 27 & 28, 94, 119 n. 6, 123 n. 49 Epicurus, see Epicureanism Epicureanism 20, 96, 98, 106, 129, 142-43, 146, 14748, 159 n. 33, 163 n. 139 esoteric, the 4, 5-6, 8, 10, 21-22, 40, 43, 44, 45, 53, 55, 64, 94-96, 99, 121 n. 71, 125-35 see also Plato, esoteric system of Euripedes 84 Evans, Murray J. 136, 138-40 evil 5, 32 n. 39, 72, 106, 130-31, 133, 140, 143-48, 158 n. 19, 159 n. 36, 168, 165 n. 185, 168 Exodus 145, 163 n. 133 forms, Platonic, see Ideas Fichte, J. G. 35, 37, 39-40, 45, 46, 48, 107, 147 Ficino, Marsilio 9, 25, 28, 31 n. 24, 33 n. 83, 77, 121 n. 71, 127, 159 n. 37 Fielding, Henry 69 Fielding, Sarah 20 Franz, Michael 108-09 Frend, William 17 Fruman, Norman 24, 93, 95 Gadamer, Hans Georg 87 n. 3 genius 7, 22, 23, 24, 52, 64, 72, 79-80, 83-84, 87, 96-97, 100, 118, 156 Gibbon, Edward, 16, 31 n. 29, 30, 94 Gilbert, Neal W. 129 Goethe, J. W. 23, 75-76 Good, the 19, 21, 50-52, 68, 72, 101, 102, 121 n. 71, 122 n. 124, 131, 143-48, 151, 158, 163 nn. 136 & 147 Grassi, Ernesto 150 Gray, Thomas 78, 102 Gregory, Alan P. R. 4, 160 n. 53 Green, J. H. 6, 10, 56, 95, 108, 140, 141, 161 n. 101, 168

Grynaeus, Simon 127-28 Hamilton, Paul 2, 3, 48, 64 Harding, Anthony 80-81, 85-86 Hare, J. C. 168 Harpur, Joseph 89-90 n. 76 Haven, Richard 24 Havelock 65, 88 n. 28 Hedley, Douglas 9, 49, 101 Hegel, G. W. F. 49, 60 n. 105, 105, 156-57 Hesiod 65-66 Hogg, T. J. 15 Homer 65-66, 68, 69, 75 homosexuality 15, 31 n. 24 Hunt, Leigh 64 Iamblichus 24, 107, 122 n. 110 Ideas (Platonic) 4, 7-8, 10, 18-19, 23, 30, 35, 51, 54, 58 n. 51, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71-73, 88 n. 41, 89 n. 55, 99, 101, 108-18, 126, 136, 139-40, 148-53, 167-68 constitutive (distinguished from regulative) 4, 36, 43-48, 50, 52, 60 n. 91, 71, 108-18, 143, 150, 152, 153, 167 see also beauty; the good imagination 4, 6, 7, 15, 16, 47, 51-52, 64, 69, 72-73, 80, 82, 91 n. 129, 99, 100, 107-08, 110, 111-16, 128, 137, 156-57 imitation, see mimesis inspiration 4, 7, 8, 20, 23, 30, 67-68, 74-82, 83-86, 90 n. 94, 91 n. 129, 99, 119 n. 26, 167 see also imagination, intuition intuition, intellectual 44-45, 54-55, 107-18 see also imagination, inspiration, Ideas, Reason irony 20, 75-78, 80 Jacobi 45, 54, 60 n. 81 Jackson, H. J. 34 n. 97, 140, 161 n. 101 Jackson, J. R. de J. 52, 93, 97, 103, 114, 118, 121 n. 74, 123 n. 152, 124 n. 176, 158 n. 23 Jasper, David 8 John, Saint 17-18, 21 Johnson, Joseph 36, 57 n. 12 Jowett, Benjamin 29, 104 Kant, Immanuel 2, 3, 6, 19, 23, 30, 35-56, 71, 93, 95, 96, 97, 102, 104-05, 108, 110-11, 133, 135, 142-43, 146-47, 148, 149, 150, 167 Anthropologie 42, 55 ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’ 37 De mundi sensibilis atque intelligiblis forma et principiis 41 Kritik der reinen Vernunft 40, 41, 45, 111, 159 n. 46 (see also Transcendental Dialectic) Kritik der Urteilskraft 50-53, 54, 61 n. 114, 159 n. 46 Logik 38 criticism of Plato 53-56 Religion innerhalb der grenzen der bloßen Vernunft 147

Index Transcendental Dialectic 45, 47-48, 108, 159 n. 46 Vermischte Schriften 41 ‘Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie’ 6, 54-56, 108 ‘Zum ewigen Frieden’ 37 see also antinomies; imagination; reason; Stoic morality Kneller, Jane 51 Lamb, Charles 24 Le Grice, Charles 14 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 40, 152 Locke, John 8, 14, 16, 22, 97, 100 logic, transcendental 25-26, 35, 42-43, 44-45, 55-56, 59 n. 67, 60 n. 81, 103-04, 121 n. 82, 151-53 logos 16-18, 25, 82, 98, 105, 147, 151, 163 n. 133 Lovejoy, A. O. 42, 57 n. 24, 60 n. 81, 159 n. 36 Maturin, Charles Robert 68 Maurice, F. D. 125 McFarland, Thomas 2-3, 11 n. 20, 24, 65, 125, 141-43, 150, 155, 158 n. 3, 159 n. 33, 162 nn. 115 & 116, 150, 155, 162 n. 125, 163 nn. 131 & 132 Mendelssohn, Moses 19 Mill, James 28-29 Mill, John Stuart 12 n. 27, 14 Milton, John 2, 5, 21, 81, 92 n. 150, 126, 127, 142, 149, 165 nn. 196 & 211, 168 Paradise Lost 153-58 mimesis 66-74, 79, 80, 82, 85, 88 nn. 28 & 41, 156, 167 Mitford, William 120 n. 51 More, Henry 72 Morgan, Caesar 18, 24 Morrison, Robert 39 Murdoch, Iris 30, 71, 89 n. 70 mysticism 7, 21-23, 23, 31, 36, 45, 50, 108, 114-17, 117, 119 n. 26 negation 7, 103, 110, 113, 138, 144, 148-53 see also sublime, negative Newlyn, Lucy 5, 9-10, 158 n. 13 Nitsch, Friedrich 37, 58 n. 44 Orsini, G. N. G. 2-3, 36, 41, 49, 58 n. 29, 123 n. 149, 159 n. 46, 167 Paley, William 20, 130, 139, 142, 143 pantheism 9, 100, 137, 156-57, 165 n. 197 Pater, Walter, ‘Coleridge’ 1, 29 Peacock, Thomas Love 14-15, 29, 58 n. 43 Perkins, Mary Anne 2, 7-9, 163 n. 133 Perry, Seamus 8-9, 22, 23, 24, 56, 155 Philo Judaeus 17, 123 n. 149 Plato: Cratylus 26, 52, 70 Critias 70

187

esoteric system of 101-06, 121 n. 86, 124-25, 129-35, 140-41, 145-46, 153, 158, 166-67 Euthyphro 19 Gorgias 127, 130 Ion 14, 20, 67, 74-82, 84 Laws 63, 67, 70, 77, 110, 121 n. 75, 145 Meno 30, 77, 129, 136 Parmenides 7, 26, 152, 164 n. 176 Phaedo 26, 50, 153 Phaedrus 5, 15, 30, 45, 53, 70, 76-81, 85, 102, 110, 116, 121 n. 81, 129, 134, 147, 153, 160 n. 65 Philebus 129 as poet 63, 98-101, 102, 112-18 Politicus 70, 103 Protagoras 66, 67-69 Republic 4, 15, 30, 30 n. 1, 31 n. 18, 63, 65, 66, 83, 101, 103, 110, 112-13, 118, 121 n. 75, 126-27, 129, 151, 156, 163 n. 136, 167 Second Letter 18, 129, 130-31 Seventh Letter 5, 54, 104 Sophist 103, 121 n. 75 Statesman 121 n. 75 Symposium 14-15, 50, 61 n. 122, 121 n. 75 Timaeus 19, 21, 25, 26-27, 66, 70, 79, 92 n. 149, 121 n. 75, 145, 147, 152-53, 163 n. 133, 164 nn. 176 & 177 unwritten doctrines, see esoteric system Plotinus 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 52, 66, 71, 73, 95, 102, 107, 109-10, 112, 114, 122 n. 112, 123 n. 139, 146 poetry, see mimesis; Socrates, critique of poesis Porphyry 27, 107 Prati, Giocchino de’ 2, 10, 168 pre-existence 13, 23, 29, 40-41, 45, 50, 81, 86, 153 Priestley, Joseph 9, 17-19, 20, 22, 24, 26, 34 Proclus 25, 27-29, 34 nn. 97 & 98, 35, 95, 112, 119 n. 26, 137, 140-41, 145, 154, 161 n. 100, 163 n. 136, 164 n. 176, 165 n. 185 Pythagoras 1, 16, 55, 91 n. 127, 94-95, 96-97, 98-99, 104, 106-07, 119 n. 26, 122 n. 110, 147 Raine, Kathleen 28 reason 1, 6, 9, 16, 18, 19, 37, 40, 42, 43-50, 52, 55, 65, 66, 69, 72, 108-13, 134, 137, 144, 158, 159 n. 46, 160 nn. 57, 68, 163 nn. 139, 167 Rees, Abraham 16, 20, 22, 31 n. 27 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard 41, 57 n. 9, 108 Richards, I. A. 64-65 Richardson, John 37 Richardson, Samuel 69 Robinson, Henry Crabb 5, 38, 39, 52, 58 n. 34, 117, 122 n. 105 Schelling, F. W. J. 2, 35, 44-46, 48, 49-50, 51, 60 n. 107, 67, 71, 73-74, 90 n. 89, 93, 95, 97, 107, 112, 123 n. 139, 139, 160 n. 57 Schiller, Friedrich 51, 81, 118 Schlegel, Friedrich 53, 141

188

Index

Schleiermacher, Friedrich 51, 102, 104, 106, 120 n. 67 Schlosser, Johann Georg 54 Schneider, Ben Ross 14, 31 n.10 Schneider, Elisabeth 84 Sextus Empiricus 97, 107 Shaffer, Elinor 90 n. 93, 162 n. 115, 163 n. 143 Shakespeare, William 15, 23, 68, 71, 80, 91 n. 129, 100, 134, 149 Shelley, Mary 15, 29 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 14-15, 63, 83 Shorey, Paul 104 Simon, John 141 Simpson, David 142 sincerity 107, 127-28, 136, 138 Socrates: critique of poesis 7, 63, 66-71, 89 n. 53, 116, 158 daemon of 7, 20, 32 n. 50, 77, 85 on dialectic 151 inspired 74-79, 84-85 martyrdom of 105, 118, 120 n. 51 as moralist 3, 44, 51, 100, 119 n. 26, 129-30, 147-48 opinions represented in Plato’s dialogues 103 as poet 100 piety of 26, 89 n. 53, 100, 118, 163 n. 136 as precursor to Plato 16, 23, 96, 97, 98, 115 on truth 126-27 as Unitarian 19-21, 32 n. 46, 120 n. 55 (see also piety of) see also anamnesis, homosexuality, irony Solon 99, 100 Sophists, see sophistry sophistry 35, 44, 48, 68, 96, 99, 103, 123 n. 145, 125, 129-30, 134-36, 151, 159 n. 31 Southey, Robert 15, 28 Speusippus 105, 106, 108, 113, 117, 118 Spinoza, Benedict 9, 55 Staël, Germaine de 39, 59 n. 62 Stanley, Thomas 93, 95, 102, 107, 122 n. 110 Steiner, George 1 Stephen, Leslie 64 Sterling, John 10, 168 Stirling, J. H. 128 Stoic morality 34, 96-97, 148, 149 sublime 96, 115-18, 124 n. 169, 126, 139, 142, 158, 168 negative 156-57 Sydenham, Floyer 14, 76, 84, 103, 121 n. 74

Symbol 9, 15, 41-42, 51-52, 61 n. 116, 108, 110, 11218, 123 n. 142, 156, 149, 153 distinguished from allegory 112-13 Taylor, Thomas 3, 14, 26-29, 31 n. 24, 52 Tennemann, W. G. 4, 6, 33 n. 85, 93, 95, 96, 99, 102-12, 118, 125, 130-33, 140, 151, 159 n. 31, 164 n. 167, 167-68 Thales 99 Thelwall, John 13, 23, 37 Tigerstedt, E. N. 78, 102, 121 n. 71 Trinity 9, 16-21, 23, 31 n. 30, 42, 95, 106, 126, 131, 142, 143-48, 150, 154, 162 n. 125, 163 n. 136, 168 Unitarianism 17-21, 23, 98, 120 n. 55, 139 see also Socrates as Unitarian Vallins, David 150 Verdenius, W. J. 70, 76 Vico, Giambattista 98, 120 n. 39 Villers, Charles de 39 Vlastos, Gregory 76, 78, 80 Voltaire 16 Walker, James 37 Wallace, Jennifer 29 Watson, George 85 Wedgewood, Josiah 35 Wellek, René 39, 44, 49, 52-53, 56, 57 n. 11, 58 nn. 29 & 44 Will (idea of) 5, 9, 27, 45, 46-47, 52, 72-74, 80, 82-83, 86-87, 110, 126, 128, 129-31, 133, 135, 139, 140, 143-48, 152-54, 157-58 see also evil; Good (idea of) Wilson, Eric G. 7 Wordsworth, Dorothy 91 n. 129 Wordsworth, William 26, 29, 37, 53, 63, 70, 79, 91 n. 129, 100-01, 117, 155-56 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ 41-42, 55, 86, 136-40, 145, 153, 155-56 Prelude 115-16, 163 n. 132 (and Coleridge) Lyrical Ballads 68 Xenophon 20, 119 n. 26 Zeno 99, 135, 148

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