Coleridge and German Philosophy The Poet in the Land of Logic
Coleridge and German Philosophy
Coleridge and
German Philosophy
The Poet in the Land of Logic
Paul Hamilton
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Contents
Abbreviations and works cited
vii
Acknowledgements
ix
Chapter 1: Coleridge in the Land of Logic
1
Chapter 2: Coleridge's Philosophical Moment
13
Chapter 3: Drama as the Motor of Romantic Theory
37
Chapter 4: Coleridge's Stamina
53
Chapter 5: Coleridge's 'Coleridge'
69
Chapter 6: Renewing Friendship: Coleridge's 'Rifacciamento'
of Philosophy
89
Chapter 7: Reading from the Inside: Coleridge's
contemporary philosophical idiom
103
Chapter 8: Spelling the World
121
Notes
139
Bibliography
161
Index
171
Abbreviations and works cited
Coleridge
Aids
BL
CC
CL
CM
CN
PhL
Logic
OM
PW
SWF
TT
The Friend
Aids to Reflection, edited by John Beer, CC9 (1993)
Biographia Literaria, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson
Bate, 2vols, CC 7 (1985)
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, general editor
Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series, 16 vols (Princeton
University Press, 1971-2001). Individual volumes in the
edition are given separate entries.
The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Earl
Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1956-71)
Marginalia, edited by Heather Jackson and George Whalley, 6
parts, CC 12 (1980-2001)
The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5
vols. Vol. 4 edited by Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen;
Vol. 5 edited by Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding.
Each vol. is in two parts, text and notes (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1957-2002)
Lay Sermons, edited by Reginald James White, CC6 (1972)
Lectures 1818-1819: On the History of Philosophy, edited by J.R.
deJ.Jackson, 2 vols, CCS (2000)
Logic, edited by James Robert dejager Jackson, CC 13 (1981)
Opus Maximum, edited by Thomas McFarland, CC 15 (2002)
Poetical Works: Part 3. Plays, edited by J.C.C. Mays and Joyce
Crick, 2 vols, CC 16 (2001)
Shorter Works and Fragments, edited by H.J.Jackson andj. R. de
J.Jackson, 2 vols, CC 11 (1995)
Table Talk, edited by Kathleen Coburn and B. Winer, 2 vols, CC
14 (1990)
The Friend, edited by Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols, CC 4 (1969)
viii
Coleridge and German Philosophy
Hegel
Phenomenology G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller,
with an analysis of the text and foreword by J. H. Findlay
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)
Werke
G.W.F. Hegel, Werke, based on the edition of the Werke of
1832-45, newly edited version by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl
Markus Michel, 21 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970)
Kant
Werke
I. Kant, Werke, edited by Wilhehn Weischedel, 12 vols (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977)
Schelling
System
Werke
F.WJ. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, introduction
by Michael Vater, translated by Peter Heath (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1978)
F.WJ. Schelling, Sdmmtliche Werke, edited by K.W.F. Scheiling,
part I, vols 1-10, part II, vols 11-14 (Stuttgart: Cotta,
1856-61)
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to various people for ideas and help important to me that
they probably were not aware of giving at the time, among them Andrew
Bowie, Howard Caygill, Jim Chandler, Lilla Crisafulli, Michael Kooy, Peter
Dews. At Queen Mary University of London I have been fortunate in working
with a cohort of inspiring graduate students who have never let me stand
still. Two current ones, Rowan Boyson and Molly Macdonald, kindly read and
commented on parts of the draft
This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Patrick Hamilton (19162005), who encouraged me to delight in a shared philosophical passion a long,
long time ago.
Chapter One
Coleridge in the Land of Logic
Coleridge and post-Kantianism
My Dream - History of Scotus, deranged as a youth / imagining himself in
the Land of Logic, lying on the Road & in the Road to the Kingdom of Truth,
falls into a criminal Intercourse with a Girl, who is in Love with him, whom
he considers as the Daughter of the King of the Land / - impersonation &
absolute Incarnation of the most Abstract -. Detected he defends himself on
this ground. O it was a wild dream, yet a deal of true psychological Feeling
at the bottom of it... (CN, I, 1824)
This book is about Coleridge's informal philosophical adventures. Informal in
the sense that their systematic presentation was never completed, and also in
the sense that their psychological satisfactions are palpable and approachable
not exclusive and remote. If we become familiar with the predominantly
German philosophical idiom in which they appear, then their adventurousness
merits the racy tale told in the Coleridgean epigraph above. As this cryptic,
early Notebook entry suggests, the story of Coleridge's philosophical connections was always going to be complicated and compromised. Spontaneously his
intellectual biography assumes dramatic form, staged vicariously through the
dream of another logician, Duns Scotus. The contemporary master-trope of
philosophical dispute in Coleridge's time was Pantheism. Truth, as Schelling's
major opponent in the revived quarrel over Pantheism, Jacobi, maintained,
need not, perhaps should not, be gained philosophically. If that is so, then
philosophy can be accused of a sort of intellectual dalliance, at best distracting
from true seriousness, at worst a 'criminal' pleasure. A defence of philosophical activity, though, lies in Scotus' claim that such intercourse is in any
case of such a degree of abstraction that its otherwise scandalous desire may
actually coincide with an ultimate mission to understand the final things. After
all, 'impersonation 8c absolute Incarnation' describes accurately Schelling's
alternative to Jacobi's theology: a God of becoming, one whose self-production
in shapes proportionate to human faculties of apprehension is what renders
him a personal God, in line with the demands of Christian dogma.
I will frequently, however, try to avoid explaining Coleridge's philosophical
adventures by attributing to him a partisan position within the repeatedly
2
Coleridge and German Philosophy
reviving Pantheismusstreti, which Coleridgeans mostly know from McFarland's
classic if engage account.1 Instead, I will concentrate on the eroticism of
Coleridge's philosophical engagements, if you like; the sheer overwhelming
pleasure the man obviously took in surfing the waves of German idealism
and post-Kantianism that followed each other in close succession. A book
taking this approach is not going to be zealous in uncovering exact sources,
preferring to look for the amplification by each other of Coleridgean and
German philosophical views and ideas. Coleridge's sympathies and antipathies
towards certain philosophical positions are not always extricable from each
other, as the guilty entanglement above suggests.
Especially significant here, for example, is the fact that, within the bounds
of the Pantheismusstreit, Schelling's response to Jacobi is both theologically
aggressive and insistent on the importance of philosophy. Against his opponents,
Schelling claims that philosophical inquiry is required for the adequate articulation of any theology worth considering. (In the philosophical terminology
of the time, this amounts to saying that it must be possible to have a system of
freedom, in which God's alterity is nevertheless connected to Reason.) It is a
short step from this to see philosophy as self-sufficient, capable of sketching
unaided the shape of ultimate explanation or of schematizing the limits of
what it is sensible to say. In the commonly accepted interpretations of the
dispute, the autonomy of philosophy from theology, the fact that it could say all
it wanted to without theological assistance, incriminated it The echoes of the
Atheismusstreit that had removed Fichte from his Chair at Jena, defeated professionally by the amateur Jacobi, must have constandy encouraged Schelling to
translate his grounding of Absolute philosophical justification into theological
terminology.
But it is also true to say that the absorption of theological speculation by
contemporary philosophical ontology endowed philosophy with all the passion
and psychological investment normally associated with religion. Scotus' infatuation was due to the degree of abstraction made erotically available through
its personal response to him. Not the girl but the fact that she might be the
daughter of the King of Logic attracts him. To do so, she must displace desire
from its usual object, excusing the philosopher's lust by having it symbolize the
bodily, affective relationship that takes over when we become intimate with the
generative sources of logic or philosophy - so becoming both the most material
and least objective of objects of desire. Our postmodern age is comparably
interested in the mobility of affect, or, following modernist Dinggedichte, the
possible superiority of representation to original as a source of vividness or a
standard of intensity. The Romantic philosophers after Kant rather understood
the necessity of representation to symbolize, as in Wordsworth's 'Immortality
Ode', an ultimate grounding exceeding representation and so only graspable
through affect rather than knowledge. And Coleridge was one of that postKantian company, involved in the controversies of just what was to count as a
legitimate exercise in ontological disclosure and what was not. In Wordsworth's
case, Coleridge always seemed to think that the jury was still o u t
Coleridge in the Land of Logic
3
Writing to T.S. Eliot at a time when he was finishing his own book on
Coleridge, IA. Richards told the poet that he had found what he wanted in
Coleridge but that he'd had to use a fair amount of coercion. Richards' book
was a critically epochal discussion that moderated major critical debates of his
time. Mine cannot claim that importance; but it does try in its more modest
way to use Coleridge in a comparably instrumental manner as the point of
many departures and returns, and looks for the same tolerance or latitude
from the reader. First it sets Coleridge's mode of thinking within a German
Romantic philosophical context as the place where his ideas can naturally
extend themselves, stretch and find speculations with which to compare
themselves. Secondly, it argues and it is hoped wins converts to the idea that
Coleridge found philosophical speculation in the dominant idiom of his times
exciting, vertiginous and as imaginatively engaging as poetry. We are accustomed to looking for the philosophical possibilities in poetry, encouraged by
that overriding ambition of writing a philosophical poem shared by Coleridge
and Wordsworth. But the siren power of philosophical writing, its indigenous
challenge to our responsive readerly constitution perhaps gets underestimated
or taken for granted in the Romantic rush to find in poetry the measure of
everything. Philosophy for Coleridge had to be already engrossing for its
poetic absorption to be so important an aim. 'Not only the poet but also the
philosopher has his raptures {EntzuckungenY wrote Schelling in The Ages of the
World?
Like most of us, if we could only admit it, Coleridge thought and wrote
largely vicariously: that is, he needed the vehicle of another person's system
to carry the freight of his own originality. If there is anything original in this
book, it is certainly thanks to Coleridge and the philosophers facilitating his
own self-expression. Not for Coleridge the stark Blakean antithesis of creation
of his own system or enslavement by another man's. Coleridge, when times
were fraught (most of the time) could express this dependency dramatically.
'My nature requires another Nature for its support, & reposes only in another
from the necessary Indigence of its being.' 3 But, in the philosophy of the
time, this drama was being extracted from its pathology and given theoretical
legitimacy. The notion that the creative act, however much it appeared to be
individual, was actually collaborative, was developed in different directions.
The Romantic construction of the unconscious (a performance once plausibly
attributed to Biographia Literaria by Catherine Belsey) endowed original
expression with an afterlife it could not have intended. 4 The critical reception's
extension of significance beyond a piece of writing's stated purpose, whether
that statement be the author's or the implication of the work's genre, removed
the writing from the jurisdiction of both. Nevertheless, new interpretations
and the critical fecundity of great art across time still reflected favourably upon
the artistic reserves of the maker. Neither subject nor object held sway here,
since the ontology of the work partook equally of both. Meanings which were
unconscious at the time of the work's inception were revealed to the artist by
his or her work, the object here taking priority. But these illuminations only
4
Coleridge and German Philosophy
made sense, only identified themselves, by illustrating things belonging to the
prior initiative that produced the work. This dramatic interchange, in which
an aesthetic work is always further realized by the efforts of others - vicariously - normalizes Coleridgean 'Indigence'. Formulated at critical moments
- in Friedrich Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragment 116 and almost simultaneously
at the crux of Schelling's System of 1800, plundered by Coleridge in Biographia
Literaria - this progressive dialectic of the unconscious unleashes the plurality
of self-expression.
Drama also underwrites the fact that the critical elaboration of an original
can take place in another idiom. Post-Kantianism did not consider that to
reinterpret was necessarily to reduce the living spirit of something to the dead
letter of exposition. The hard-won doctrine of aesthetic autonomy emerging
from Kant's third Critique and most memorably deployed by Friedrich Schiller
would seem to endorse this isolation of the aesthetic 'object' from subsequent
criticism of it. But post-Kantianism was a philosophical battleground in which
the master himself was subjected to the logic of the vicarious, or the various
ways in which his successors spoke through him or in his spirit. Coleridge
agreed with Kant that ideas of reason were uncontainable within our understanding; but he followed those who transformed the regulative effect to which
Kant restricted our apprehension of ideas into a sense of their progressiveness
and productivity. Ideas embodied 'an infinite power of semination'. Coleridge
had to devise a new rhetorical term to pinpoint the permanent ideality so
infinitely differentiated. He called it 'tautegory'. Tautegory could be used to
describe the expansion into many discourses, under the pressure of historical
difference, of an Absolute truth originally only revealed in one discourse.5
Coleridge notoriously tried to shuttle between poetry and philosophy, theology
and science, criticism, politics and just about everything else available. He
would have agreed, surely, with Friedrich Schlegel that poetry's inherently
dramatic dimension gave the lead to other discourses to collaborate, join
forces, amalgamate and help form the new mythology needed for intellection
to be adequate to modern reality.6
Coleridge's most comprehensive descriptors of this ambition were words
like Logos, Logosophia, anti-babel, even 'the last possible epic, The Fall of
Jerusalem'.7 For Friedrich Schlegel and the Jena group of 1798-1800, ideas were
'the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts', but this
drama was already recruiting a still wider cast.8 The 'anti-babel' is perhaps the
most fruitful of Coleridge's wish-list to pursue here. In the first paragraph of
the 'Transcendental Doctrine of Method' of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant
fascinatingly regarded the preceding 'Doctrine of Elements', or transcendental deduction of the conditions necessary for experience to be possible, as
an 'estimate (Vorrat) of the building materials' required for the Babel of pure
reason he had been critiquing. While we can think 'the idea' of such a totality,
the materials at our disposal restrict us to building on 'the plane of experience'
instead. More than this, though, 'the confusion of languages that unavoidably
divided the workers over the plan, and dispersed them throughout the world,
Coleridge in the Land of Logic
5
[left] each to build on his own according to his design'.9 Coleridge's notebook
entry 3254, examined in Chapter 4, must 'build' on Kant's metaphor. It was
precisely this given idea of experience that the post-Kantians, starting with
Fichte, wanted to understand progressively. They wanted to do this by breaking
down the isolation of discursive disciplines from each other, and getting them
to engage in dramatic dialogue. From Fichte onwards, ideas of production
began to circumscribe those of representation. Kant had analysed the manifold
necessary for cognition to work and the dialectical tractability of reality this
functionality was obliged to assume. His successors studied the dynamic
production of the former by the latter. Imprisoned as Kant thinks we are within
representation, the 'X' outside representation must be, as he says, 'nothing
for us'.10 Their answer to this ban is to develop out of Kant's other critiques
of aesthetic and teleological judgement a productive rather than representational paradigm of correspondence. The consequent striving of cognition to
get on terms with its own production energizes a drama present from Fichte's
Wissenschaftslehre (Science of Knowledge, versions from 1794 onwards) to Hegel's
1806 Phenomenology.11 Between these two, more and more discursive resources
are requisitioned for the task. The delegation or relay of purely philosophical
authority matches that of the subject. For of course the subject must be still
unconscious of what remains its potential, though a potential which, like
Schlegel's prophetic historian, we must think of as the productive future in our
past. We only need to look at the exorbitant criteria Coleridge sets the unfortunate Wordsworth for the creation of the philosophical poem he thought he
should have written instead of The Excursion to feel the exhilarating pressure of
the post-Kantian idea to create a concerted but indeterminate discursive front
in pursuit of ends of which it was evidently not fully conscious.12
If philosophy's ultimate task is to explain not only how we represent the
world, but how we think the production of those representations rather than
others, then it has something close to a creation-myth on its hands. This can
lead in many directions, not all of them doctrinal ones. For a Christian like
Coleridge, though, theoretical discourses closest to a theodicy would feel the
most benign. But while Coleridgean knowledge is, according to the famous
climax of the first volume of Biographia Literaria, a finite repetition of 'the
infinite I AM', this acceptance of being spoken is close to anxieties Coleridge
was voicing before reading the Germans, anxieties heard louder after he had
read them and published and re-published the mystery poems, 'The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner', 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan' in 1816-17. In the fourth
of the Philosophical Lectures of 1819, Coleridge sets out an acceptable version of
truth's divine ventriloquism.
/ know, intuitively know, that there is a power essential to my nature, and
which is 'I ought, I ought not, I should not', and that voice is original and
self-existent, not an echo of a prior voice (I mean the voice of prudential
self-love) but the very source out of which self-love must flow. (PhL, I,
178)
6
Coleridge and German Philosophy
This passage sounds uncharacteristically Fichtean in its reliance on conscience,
but the use of 'love' to validate our Very source7 suggests Schelling's moral
psychology. The mystery poems, though, play through various ideas of
repetition, and in their narratives the meaning of repetition ranges from
the progressive domestication of an original dynamism in 'Kubla Khan' to
the fear of an imposing instrumentalism evident in the other two. In T h e
Rime', puzzling in its mixture of arbitrariness and moralizing, 'an enigma
in the form of an explanation', repetition is the master-trope at all levels.13
However accepting and resigned the mariner's homily at the end appears, he
is nevertheless driven by the desire to re-tell his tale for his chosen audience, as
forcefully as the dead crew of his ship had been possessed to man their stations
again. Indeed, Anna Maria Cimitile has recendy argued from a knowledgeably
European theoretical perspective, that insofar as the poem's central fantasy
reflects upon itself in the poem it produces a spectral slavery.14 In the context
of Coleridge's post-Kantianism, the spectral quality of slavery in fact locates it
in Coleridge's deepest anxieties about the human power lovingly to accept its
determination or vocation. Far from dematerializing slavery, the spectral aspect
lets it stand for the most fundamental violation Coleridge could imagine - a
savage perversion of that amiable dispensation normally allowing us to enjoy a
self-determining human subjectivity in the act of representing its production
of us. As Cimitile states simply: 'Slavery is the absence of subjectivity'.15 That
the poem appears unconscious of its indictment of the slave trade lets slavery
figure for the post-Kantian philosopher the blighting of all past and future
sources of human possibility.
'Christabel' also dramatizes the fear of being spoken by another, here
presented as the unpleasant contraction of the individual, like a dove being
clasped by a snake, the movement of their breathing indistinguishable.
Geraldine, the snake, then substitutes for Christabel, the dove, and proves
her success by engaging in an otherwise incestuous dalliance with Christabel's
father, Sir Leoline. The impossibly elfin child at the end spells out the implications. 'Kubla Khan' moves through a succession of re-enactments of an
originally unfocused creative energy without reaching resolution. Coleridge's
three great mystery poems appear caught in a sceptical philosophical moment.
Their trademark reflexivity - the extent to which they are about their own
production - is curiously dubious about its own achievement Their circularity, far from providing exemplary images of self-production, suggests the
limitations of purely imaginative solutions and encourages a readership which
will be culturally urbane enough to appreciate this progressive self-criticism.
Certainly, this lx>ok argues in the next chapter, both Schelling on Dante and
Hegel on scepticism help us fill out a picture of the reading skills Coleridge's
poems require. Such skill is above all historicist: the talent to detect the
persistence of the past in the present, its creative repetitions constructed to a
new finitude, and gesturing towards a future. Schelling's fullest exposition of
this historicism took place in his unpublished masterpiece The Ages of the World
(Die Weltalter) which remained in draft form after his death. Coleridge, as the
Coleridge in the Land of Logic
7
editors of his Marginalia point out, would have heard of it because Schelling
describes his essay Ueber die GoUheiten von Samothrace as a supplement to Die
WeUaUer, and Coleridge read that.16 But Coleridge appears to find his own way
of expressing the historicist possibilities for Schellingian philosophy after the
Freedom essay and Schelling's reworking of its main thought against Jacobi in
the Denkmal a few years later. Coleridge calls the identity persisting through
historical changes an 'idea'; he thinks of the changes as 'infinite semination'.
The rhetorical figure capable of symbolizing such exchanges is a 'tautegory'.
The social class he invented to make the study of tautegory, or permanence
in progression, its profession and something it embodied, was to be the
'Qerisy'.
The road-map
The following chapters try to make good these claims about Coleridge and
the German philosophical context I use to explain each other.17 Inevitably
boosted by supplements from marginalia, letters and notebooks, which the
Bollingen edition of the Collected Coleridge makes so freely available, the book
focuses on central prose texts by Coleridge - Biographia Literaria, The Friend, the
Opus Maximum - and keeps re-examining some of the major poems along with
Coleridge's own conflicted analysis of Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode'. These
are the main areas of concentration. The first chapter writes Coleridge into
the German philosophical background with some determination. Hegel is a
neglected figure in Coleridgean studies. No wonder, since Coleridge only read
a few pages of his work. But Hegel, especially in his Phenomenology, remains
not only the foremost commentator on the speculations of his age, but makes
out of that commentary his own philosophy. For Coleridge's eclectic thinking
to be out of the loop here would therefore be unusual. One of the benefits
of the freedoms this book takes with a conventional history of ideas is to keep
Coleridge in the Hegelian picture to which he evidently belongs.18 Coleridge's
philosophizing only comes fully alive within the ambit of that of his avant-garde
German contemporaries. Coleridge's favouring of Schelling only reveals its full
force if we know about the intellectual quarrel between Schelling and Hegel.
All Coleridge's other intellectual borrowings and investments do not really
set up an alternative theoretical establishment: but they do fuel his power to
intervene in the dominant philosophical idiom of the time.
Schelling, though, was the post-Kantian philosopher of dynamic productivity
most congenial to Coleridge. The explanation of the two imaginations and
fancy central to Biographia Literaria lose their main philosophical force unless
they are referred back to Schelling's ontological explanation of the world as
the doubling and repetition in differentiated form of an original identity.
After Biographia Literaria, Coleridge began disparaging Schelling in earnest,
especially the scheme of Schelling's Freedom essay which was the published
8
Coleridge and German Philosophy
culmination of Schelling's philosophy up to that date (1809) and the basis of
its further development in unpublished seminars, written drafts and lectures
for the next 45 years. As Raimonda Modiano points out, Coleridge's letters
to J.H. Green distancing himself from Schelling seem founded on a reading
of the much earlier Einleitung of 1799. He also seems to buy into Jacobi's
argument that Schelling perpetuates the elenchia - or what Modiano calls a
'violation of hierarchical standards' - of deducing a superior power from an
inferior one.19 But it is the Freedom essay he admired that lies behind notebook
entries such as the following.
In short, Schelling's System and mine stand thus:- in the latter there are God
and Chaos: sind in the former an Absolute Somewhat, which is alternately
both, the rapid leger de main shifting of which constitutes the delusive
appearance of Poles ... (CAT, 4,4662)
Here, Schelling's polar logic is an illusion; so is Schelling's idea that God is
grounded in an Unconscious prior to putting on his individuality, a reserve
on which subsequent tautegorical repetitions draw. Coleridge, desiring more
explicit revelation, thinks this leaves 'all hanging in frivolous & idle sort.
Schwebend.' (CN, 4,4664)
This seems pretty clear-cut. Coleridge Christianizes Schelling's ontology,
replacing its logic with doctrine. Two considerations should give us pause
though. Firstly, as just noted, Coleridge was always fascinated in his poetry by
images of how fproductivity could go wrong, those scenarios of instrumentalism
from which we needed Christian virtue to rescue us. In other words, he appears
to look for ways of describing how we can seek the chaos behind benign
creativity, as if we could choose from it another creative purpose, one enslaving
others to its selfish interest. Secondly, Coleridge's use of tautegory, and (as we
shall see) Schelling's later appropriation of it, show him continuing to practise
Schelling's 'leger de main' in ways Schelling recognized and appreciated.
Coleridge, here as elsewhere, participates in post-Kantianism so as to
return it constantly to the issue of expression. His early dramatic writings are
already part of a project in line with his philosophical interests. When the
philosophy begins to enlist different discourses in the service of new standards
of theoretical adequacy, it translates the earlier sense of dramatic interplay into
its own idiom. Chapter 3, 'Drama as the Motor of Romantic Theory', examines
how this happens. Dramatic philosophy takes place in a setting traditionally
thought hostile to drama because of the typically Romantic habit of introspection. In fact, post-Kantian theory brings the two together, and the dialogic
quality of self-understanding, an idea going back to Shaftesbury, is explored.
The self, eluding conclusive representation, is more like a play we produce
than a single character. This insight connects with the larger post-Kantian
strategies for de;iling with questions of ontology.
The next chapter, 'Coleridge's Stamina', examines Coleridge's central
metaphor for the 'ideas' with which his writing - poetical, philosophical,
Coleridge in the Land of Logic
9
political - strove to get on terms. Usually, 'ideas' are tied exclusively to such
locutions of Coleridge and Goethe as 'the translucence of the general /
universal in the particular / individual'. The strains this claim for representation puts on its symbolism are evident, and the claims of symbol have been
conspicuously critiqued in twentieth-century theory from Walter Benjamin to
Paul de Man. I reconsider that critique and argue that it must not be allowed
to let the productive, historicist dimension contrived for symbol by Coleridge
and Schelling to be effaced. Then, in Chapter 5, Coleridge's literary autobiography, Coleridge's 'Coleridge', is read as a case study of Coleridge's power
to evoke the production of a self and to use it as a model for philosophical
understanding. His autobiography is presented as a biography, as a Biographia,
and that impersonality along with the writing's dramatic exercises in vicarious
expression are again argued to connect fruitfully with the complexities of the
post-Kantian critique of representation generally.
Around the time he published Biographia Literaria, Coleridge also projects
his 'rifacciamento' or re-making of The Friend. This endeavour is far more than
the 1818 revival of the periodical of a decade earlier. In renewing his idea of
philosophical friendship, Coleridge's plot appears to be, overall, to explore
the role of affect in philosophical explanation. His admiration for and distrust
of Kant's alleged Stoicism, already a topic in my earlier chapters, is clarified
through Coleridge's stipulation of relationship and communication as fundamental requirements of the concept of truth. There is a helpful conjuncture
here with recent postmodern discussions of friendship as the politics for an age
in which politics appears in need of rehabilitation.
How contemporary are Coleridge's philosophical concerns? Occasionally, I
find it necessary and easy to slip into the idiom of modern and postmodern
thinkers and their areas of interest (Heidegger and Wittgenstein on ontology,
Derrida on friendship, Deleuze on Stoicism). The penultimate chapter,
'Reading from the Inside', looks both at the details of Coleridge's construction
of 'tautegory' and at its transmission through different critical reading
practices and theory to the present day. While reading from inside an obligatory conceptual framework, European philosophy has always felt the need
to address our sense of these boundaries, and the kind of delegations of its
own authority it has to make to other discourses in order to evoke what for a
monologic philosophy, bound to the task of explaining the logic of representation, must, as we heard Kant say earlier, remain 'nothing for us'.
Many, though, have suspected this degree of philosophical inclusiveness
and generosity as it appeared in Schelling. Friedrich Engels, a member of
the audience of Schelling's late Berlin lectures, found him to be all things to
all people. 'Protean' is another ambiguous adjective to have been applied.
Karl Jaspers pointed out, more sympathetically, Schelling's trick of gesturing
as much outside his current system as making his present one cohere from
within. Schelling is currently in vogue. Two recent, indeed overlapping, books
on the 'new' Schelling - new as in the 'new' Nietzsche, Bergson and Sartre
- indicate an intensity of interest which builds on a continuous revival from
10
Coleridge and German Phibsophy
Heidegger onwards.20 Evident is a willingness to discount Schelling's apparent
mysticism in the interests of foregrounding something else: the discursive mix
it takes - aesthetic, ethical, mythological, psychoanalytical, theological - to
make that existential apprehension, discovered by philosophy but beyond its
powers of expression, remain credible. Coleridge in his way began the work
needing to be done here, with his ideas about tautegory.
Hegel, arguably, is always new. Certainly the episode of the Phenomenobgy
that his critics use to try to explode his system changes over time. Postmodern
thinkers like Deleuze elaborate a Stoic resistance to conceptual principle
intended to go beyond Hegel's power to control. For Alexandre Kojeve and
his existentialist followers it had been the master/slave episode which they
had tried to elaborate unmanageably. Otherwise a totalizing Hegel, intolerant
of the individual's right to resist generalization, supervenes. But still more
recently, re-appraisals like Gillian Rose's have theorized more persuasively the
saving gaps and theoretical openings in Hegel's logic so as to recover a truly
speculative Hegel. Hegel's self-departures from his own system, it is argued,
can be attributed to him. It is the peculiar nature of the speculative proposition, formally postulated but never investigated across different discourses,
that allows Hegel to take credit for the speculative provisionality his critics
have otherwise opposed to his system. Hegel, while writing across many
historical discourses in the Phenomenology, is reticent (and restricted to formal
investigation in the Science of Logic) about the implications for philosophical
expression of such speculation. Again, as with Schelling, this leaves work to be
done which Coleridge, with his inveterate recourse to discussions of language,
helps inaugurate.
The final chapter looks at Coleridge's mode of addressing the speculative problem at its broadest, using Schelling, Hegel and Wordsworth as
the most helpful points of orientation. Coleridge's conclusion that 'our
modern philosophy is spelling throughout' competes with the virtuosity of
Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode' when it tries to make poetry adequate to
the task of describing us Absolutely. In its approach to the poetic challenge,
philosophy, to use current analytic terminology, can be either foundational
or anti-foundational: it can claim a privileged grounding in truth or it can
be willing to delegate its authority in order to make possible the evocation of
what philosophy can uniquely think but not express. In the latter mode it can
concede to other ways of writing the function of ascertaining an Absolute that
by definition exceeds the powers of its own discernment. It can live vicariously.
Poetry, when epistemological on its own account, can only be foundational.21
When does one hear of poets opting for the strategically prosaic in order to get
across an especially poetic felicity? Coleridge worries that a foundational poetic
contact with what we Absolutely are, necessarily immediate, would render
such ultimate authenticity as a sort of nonsense, epitomized by Wordsworth's
'child Philosopher' of the 'Immortality Ode'. 'What we call knowledge', wrote
Schelling in the 'Introduction' to the third draft of the Weltalter, is 'more of
a striving toward knowledge than knowledge itself. like Wordsworth in his
Coleridge in the Land of Logic
11
famous remarks to Isabella Fenwick on the 'Ode', he described 'anamnesis'
as the goal producing this philosophical quest to get behind itself. Coleridge
worries that Wordsworth's own poetic striving towards the same Platonic goal
takes the immediacy of its own poetic success to be a sign of immediate epistemological success - what Tim Milnes calls 'a philosophy-transcending "poetic"
truth'.22
Another way of putting this, Hegel's way, is to say that immediacy, under
analysis, empties itself of the particular 'here and now' supposed to demonstrate its certainty. It becomes uniform and universal in its range of reference.
It is always the same because our guarantee of its truth is that it has no need of
mediating characteristics which might distinguish its examples and occasions.
Intriguingly, though, Schelling launched an attack on Hegel's entire system on
much the same grounds. There is, Schelling argued in his Lectures on Modern
Philosophy, a sameness about the presence of the Absolute at each stage of
Hegel's Phenomenology, a common principle of contradiction rather than a
something new each time on analogy with the continual development of a
personality out of an unconscious past. Schelling here is seeking to use the
philosophical nuclear option of the time against Hegel, the accusation of
Pantheism. God in everything means that everything, theologically, is the same.
Particular differences go by the board, as a truth for which mediation is irrelevant is therefore allowed to shine through all things in equal measure. This is
extremely close to Coleridge's attack on Wordsworth's 'Ode'. Pantheism does
not let us make sense of the world.
The speculative Hegel has his own means of escaping this attack. Wordsworth's
defence, or the best one that we can find for him, is to attack: to defeat philosophical
objection with the winning sufficiency of his poetry. Schelling and Coleridge could
argue that Wordsworth's bid for universal authority just looks eccentric. His 'Ode'
retains the particular, idiomatic character which it was its Absolute project to shed.
Wordsworth would do better to charge our ordinary usage with the numinous than
devise unbelievable characters and scenarios. Adorno commended a language that
in its descriptions could be simultaneously 'identical and non4dentical'. Resuming
the post-Kantian tradition, he argued that 'through the deity, language is transformed from tautology to language' P After Nietzsche, after theology, he must have
thought, we are still left with the burden of maintaining non-identity if language
is to flourish. To avoid tautology, our language has to cultivate in us, as Coleridge
wanted it to do, the power to respond to historical change without slavish acquiescence in the prescriptions of civilization we have inherited. Our 'cultivation' is
the central mission of the Clerisy in Coleridge's On the Constitution of the Oiurth
and State According to the Idea of Each (1830). But to opt out of identity altogether,
certain of our unaided, immediate poetic grasp of ourselves outside the limitatioris
of identity, won't do either. We cannot disport ourselves with Wordsworth's poetic
children in some utterly liminal landscape without hypostatizing in effect another
identity, an impossibly Absolute one.
So, finally, has Coleridge won and Wordsworth lost? The answer offered
by the post-Kantian thinking this book studies is that this contest is actually
12
Coleridge and German Philosophy
a collaboration. Both sides are part of a movement in which, over time, as
Schlegel and others argued, both can vacate their original positions for new,
more composite forms of speech. Wordsworth's poetry can tell us of our
unquenchable and self-defeating desires for our immediate reconciliation
with our destiny. Coleridge's philosophy heightens our sense of the impossibility of such a vocation and the strangely indefensible intellectual postures
to which it drives us. Wordsworth's poetry can then rid us of this feeling of
being ridiculous by its unanswerable exhibition of a need and longing which,
he persuades us, we do indeed experience. Coleridge questions the credentials
of that experience to call itself experience, and Wordsworth finds for those
doubts an existential expression. And so the process continues, tautegorically rather than tautologically, the same only different each time. Poetry and
philosophy are each other's extension. They are on the stage, at the same time,
in dramatic dialogue. The reader of both is the winner.
Chapter Two
Coleridge's Philosophical Moment
The Difference between Fichte and Schelling
When Coleridge excitedly told Thomas Poole in a famous letter of 1801 that he
had * extricated' the notions of Time and Space, and overthrown the doctrine of
the association of ideas or mainstay of British empiricist psychology along with
its (associated) determinist metaphysics, he was also describing his entry into
the arena of German philosophy.1 Not that the Germans noticed. For Coleridge,
though, the break was obviously revelatory. Crabb Robinson describes how 'a
German friend' listening to Coleridge's 1811 lectures convinced him that
'Coleridge's mind is much more German than English. My friend has pointed
out striking analogies between Coleridge and German authors whom Coleridge
has never seen .. ,'2 The corollary of this would be Coleridge's frequent claims
that he found Kant and the post-Kantians anticipated by earlier philosophers,
by Bruno, Boehme, the Cambridge Platonists and others. His point, although
expressed with his customary mixture of apology,rivalryand emulation, seems,
in effect, to be less about precedence and more about his enjoyment of the
contemporary German idiom in which he found perennial philosophical
concerns updated and historically expressive.
Coincidentally, in the same year as Coleridge's coup de foudne, Hegel was
also trying to extricate himself from his native philosophical inheritance. In
his essay on The Difference Between Fichtes and ScheUing's Systems of Philosophy, he
championed Schelling's development of the 'spirit' of Kant's philosophy over
Fichte's. In early letters (1795) to Hegel from the Tubingen Stift, the educational establishment he attended with Hegel and Holderlin, Schelling wrote of
an entrenched fidelity to the letter of Kant's philosophy, and of the contrary
need to discover the premises of which Kant's philosophy may have given the
result, but which it itself lacked.3 In the variable of 'spirit' also lay hidden the
growth that was to culminate in Hegel'sfirstmajor philosophical achievement,
the Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807. By then Hegel had broken with Schelling,
and Schelling was on the way to criticizing Hegel's own philosophy as too
idealist, too focused on conceptual possibility and neglectful of ontology: those
'premises' or ultimately prior explanations of the astonishing fact that anything
exists rather than what it has become. Potentially mystical, this ontological
focus on the determination or attunement (the German Bestimmungcarries the
14
Coleridge and German Philosophy
same vocational loading) of existence powered not only Kierkegaard's existentialism but also Marx's materialism, in which nature is characterized not by its
(Hegelian) logical essentials but by its potential to be historically transformed
into our authentic reality. Human beings, thought the young Marx, overcame
their alienation under capitalism by transforming nature into their proper
abode. Thus they allowed their true natural history - their determination
as a species being - to begin.4 Hegel's break with a Fichtean version of Kant
is one of the first moments provoking the new ways of thinking.5 Coleridge
sides with Schelling and Hegel against Fichte, and eventually with Schelling
against Hegel, although he can be placed illuminatingly within Hegel's
speculative history. The critique of Fichte, though, expresses itself as the
reinterpretation of Kant, and Coleridge shares this post-Kantian philosophical
self-understanding too.
According to Hegel in his 1801 Difference essay, Fichte's Wissenschaftslekre or
'Science of knowledge' drew the full implications latent in two related tenets
of Kant's philosophy. Kant thought that the categories of the understanding
possessed absolute jurisdiction in questions of knowledge. Kant also claimed
that a transcendental unity of apperception - an 'I think' accompanying all
acts of understanding - was necessary for any experience to be possible.
Experience had to belong, had to be someone's, could not be free-floating.
Joined together by Fichte, these two precepts generated the notion of an
Absolute subject or possessor of the exemplary experience. It is a short step to
say that knowledge and experience are nothing other than the self-positing of
this Absolute. Nature then becomes for Fichte merely the 'not-F, the negative
of self-projection, posited in order for understanding to have something to act
upon. What the self-conscious 'I' simultaneously knows is an effect of its own
activity. As long as that activity continues, the 'not-F will never be conclusively
understood. Schelling appropriated this picture of the production of reality
from a developing ground of which we are never fully conscious. But he took
the Fichtean striving out of the exclusively subjective realm at the expense of
the coherence of Fichte's system. This was no failure on Schelling's part, as
some commentators have thought, but what Schelling wanted to do - to reconceive ideas of philosophical adequacy outside received notions of system.6
In his final formulation, Fichte calls the production of 'not-F from T an
1
original duplicity'.7 In Hegel's critical view, such a merger only added another
tier to 'the philosophical construction' of the faculty doing the synthesis.8 To
try to amalgamate reflection with action in this way did not make Fichte's reality
any less ideal. Schelling thought Fichte failed, and exploited that failure. Hegel
thought that Fichte remained consistently a philosopher of reflection, and that
his system remained static and unhistorical as a result Hegel's own phenomenology exhaustively analysed all the historical varieties of self-consciousness
and the worlds they implied. But then he arguably doubled Fichte's negation
to show the reverse production of the 'I' from the 'not-I' or realm of 'Spirit'
(the not * not-I') whose progress was then recounted by the rest of his phenomenology. As soon as 'Spirit' becomes an independently productive agent, it
Coleridge's Philosophical Moment
15
is no longer just an epiphenomenon of the T , such as the 'not-I', but has
become the negation of that negation. Coleridge seems to have found his way
round these difficult negatives on his own. In a note to Fichte's Grundlage, he
asked pertinently: 'Is not a portion of the Obscurity of the Wissenschaftslehre
attributable to the choice of the "Ich" instead of Soul or Spirit?'
Coleridge's note then continues in Schellingian terms: 'With the T we habitually connect the present Potence of Consciousness'.9 Potenzen or potencies
were the different powers of the Absolute (in analogy with the mathematical
idea of numbers to the power of their squares, cubes etc.) as it manifested itself
at different levels of existence - mineral, chemical, animal, psychological. Hegel
preferred to record these variables as the history of Spirit. But in the Difference
essay Hegel appreciated Schelling's move to save nature from entire absorption
into the philosophy of the Fichtean subject. Nor did Schelling's nature exist
in itself, so as through some final potency to encompass subjectivity as well.
The Absolute was the identity of both subject and object: whatever continuum
they shared in order to make their comparison, identification or opposition
possible. This, at any rate, is the emphasis that distinguishes Schelling's earlier
Naturphilosophiefromthe Identitdtsphilosophie, 'identity philosophy', in which it
became incoporated. Coleridge's note to Fichte clearly places him inside this
debate, exercised by its options and possible variants.
Coleridge's marginalia tend to be aggressive. He affects astonishment at Kant's
betises. Fichte is roundly castigated and repeatedly compared unfavourably with
Kant. So is Jacobi, and his attack on the Kantian and post-Kantian tradition
in Uber die gottlkhen Dinge is marked down as ungenerous despite its evident
anti-Pantheistic stance. But then Jacobi is defended in Coleridge's notes to
Schelling's response in his Denkmat, and, generally, Coleridge's hostility to
Schelling grows in proportion to the closeness with which his thought glosses
Coleridge's own fundamentally religious orientation. It is just after his copious
use of Schelling and criticism of Fichte in Biographia Literari
Coleridge and
German Philosophy
The Poet in the Land of Logic
Paul Hamilton
continuum
Continuum
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© Paul Hamilton 2007
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Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
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EISBN 9780826495433
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Typeset by Fakenham Photosetting Limited
Contents
Abbreviations and works cited
vii
Acknowledgements
ix
Chapter 1: Coleridge in the Land of Logic
1
Chapter 2: Coleridge's Philosophical Moment
13
Chapter 3: Drama as the Motor of Romantic Theory
37
Chapter 4: Coleridge's Stamina
53
Chapter 5: Coleridge's 'Coleridge'
69
Chapter 6: Renewing Friendship: Coleridge's 'Rifacciamento'
of Philosophy
89
Chapter 7: Reading from the Inside: Coleridge's
contemporary philosophical idiom
103
Chapter 8: Spelling the World
121
Notes
139
Bibliography
161
Index
171
Abbreviations and works cited
Coleridge
Aids
BL
CC
CL
CM
CN
PhL
Logic
OM
PW
SWF
TT
The Friend
Aids to Reflection, edited by John Beer, CC9 (1993)
Biographia Literaria, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson
Bate, 2vols, CC 7 (1985)
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, general editor
Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series, 16 vols (Princeton
University Press, 1971-2001). Individual volumes in the
edition are given separate entries.
The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Earl
Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1956-71)
Marginalia, edited by Heather Jackson and George Whalley, 6
parts, CC 12 (1980-2001)
The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5
vols. Vol. 4 edited by Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen;
Vol. 5 edited by Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding.
Each vol. is in two parts, text and notes (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1957-2002)
Lay Sermons, edited by Reginald James White, CC6 (1972)
Lectures 1818-1819: On the History of Philosophy, edited by J.R.
deJ.Jackson, 2 vols, CCS (2000)
Logic, edited by James Robert dejager Jackson, CC 13 (1981)
Opus Maximum, edited by Thomas McFarland, CC 15 (2002)
Poetical Works: Part 3. Plays, edited by J.C.C. Mays and Joyce
Crick, 2 vols, CC 16 (2001)
Shorter Works and Fragments, edited by H.J.Jackson andj. R. de
J.Jackson, 2 vols, CC 11 (1995)
Table Talk, edited by Kathleen Coburn and B. Winer, 2 vols, CC
14 (1990)
The Friend, edited by Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols, CC 4 (1969)
viii
Coleridge and German Philosophy
Hegel
Phenomenology G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller,
with an analysis of the text and foreword by J. H. Findlay
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)
Werke
G.W.F. Hegel, Werke, based on the edition of the Werke of
1832-45, newly edited version by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl
Markus Michel, 21 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970)
Kant
Werke
I. Kant, Werke, edited by Wilhehn Weischedel, 12 vols (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977)
Schelling
System
Werke
F.WJ. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, introduction
by Michael Vater, translated by Peter Heath (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1978)
F.WJ. Schelling, Sdmmtliche Werke, edited by K.W.F. Scheiling,
part I, vols 1-10, part II, vols 11-14 (Stuttgart: Cotta,
1856-61)
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to various people for ideas and help important to me that
they probably were not aware of giving at the time, among them Andrew
Bowie, Howard Caygill, Jim Chandler, Lilla Crisafulli, Michael Kooy, Peter
Dews. At Queen Mary University of London I have been fortunate in working
with a cohort of inspiring graduate students who have never let me stand
still. Two current ones, Rowan Boyson and Molly Macdonald, kindly read and
commented on parts of the draft
This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Patrick Hamilton (19162005), who encouraged me to delight in a shared philosophical passion a long,
long time ago.
Chapter One
Coleridge in the Land of Logic
Coleridge and post-Kantianism
My Dream - History of Scotus, deranged as a youth / imagining himself in
the Land of Logic, lying on the Road & in the Road to the Kingdom of Truth,
falls into a criminal Intercourse with a Girl, who is in Love with him, whom
he considers as the Daughter of the King of the Land / - impersonation &
absolute Incarnation of the most Abstract -. Detected he defends himself on
this ground. O it was a wild dream, yet a deal of true psychological Feeling
at the bottom of it... (CN, I, 1824)
This book is about Coleridge's informal philosophical adventures. Informal in
the sense that their systematic presentation was never completed, and also in
the sense that their psychological satisfactions are palpable and approachable
not exclusive and remote. If we become familiar with the predominantly
German philosophical idiom in which they appear, then their adventurousness
merits the racy tale told in the Coleridgean epigraph above. As this cryptic,
early Notebook entry suggests, the story of Coleridge's philosophical connections was always going to be complicated and compromised. Spontaneously his
intellectual biography assumes dramatic form, staged vicariously through the
dream of another logician, Duns Scotus. The contemporary master-trope of
philosophical dispute in Coleridge's time was Pantheism. Truth, as Schelling's
major opponent in the revived quarrel over Pantheism, Jacobi, maintained,
need not, perhaps should not, be gained philosophically. If that is so, then
philosophy can be accused of a sort of intellectual dalliance, at best distracting
from true seriousness, at worst a 'criminal' pleasure. A defence of philosophical activity, though, lies in Scotus' claim that such intercourse is in any
case of such a degree of abstraction that its otherwise scandalous desire may
actually coincide with an ultimate mission to understand the final things. After
all, 'impersonation 8c absolute Incarnation' describes accurately Schelling's
alternative to Jacobi's theology: a God of becoming, one whose self-production
in shapes proportionate to human faculties of apprehension is what renders
him a personal God, in line with the demands of Christian dogma.
I will frequently, however, try to avoid explaining Coleridge's philosophical
adventures by attributing to him a partisan position within the repeatedly
2
Coleridge and German Philosophy
reviving Pantheismusstreti, which Coleridgeans mostly know from McFarland's
classic if engage account.1 Instead, I will concentrate on the eroticism of
Coleridge's philosophical engagements, if you like; the sheer overwhelming
pleasure the man obviously took in surfing the waves of German idealism
and post-Kantianism that followed each other in close succession. A book
taking this approach is not going to be zealous in uncovering exact sources,
preferring to look for the amplification by each other of Coleridgean and
German philosophical views and ideas. Coleridge's sympathies and antipathies
towards certain philosophical positions are not always extricable from each
other, as the guilty entanglement above suggests.
Especially significant here, for example, is the fact that, within the bounds
of the Pantheismusstreit, Schelling's response to Jacobi is both theologically
aggressive and insistent on the importance of philosophy. Against his opponents,
Schelling claims that philosophical inquiry is required for the adequate articulation of any theology worth considering. (In the philosophical terminology
of the time, this amounts to saying that it must be possible to have a system of
freedom, in which God's alterity is nevertheless connected to Reason.) It is a
short step from this to see philosophy as self-sufficient, capable of sketching
unaided the shape of ultimate explanation or of schematizing the limits of
what it is sensible to say. In the commonly accepted interpretations of the
dispute, the autonomy of philosophy from theology, the fact that it could say all
it wanted to without theological assistance, incriminated it The echoes of the
Atheismusstreit that had removed Fichte from his Chair at Jena, defeated professionally by the amateur Jacobi, must have constandy encouraged Schelling to
translate his grounding of Absolute philosophical justification into theological
terminology.
But it is also true to say that the absorption of theological speculation by
contemporary philosophical ontology endowed philosophy with all the passion
and psychological investment normally associated with religion. Scotus' infatuation was due to the degree of abstraction made erotically available through
its personal response to him. Not the girl but the fact that she might be the
daughter of the King of Logic attracts him. To do so, she must displace desire
from its usual object, excusing the philosopher's lust by having it symbolize the
bodily, affective relationship that takes over when we become intimate with the
generative sources of logic or philosophy - so becoming both the most material
and least objective of objects of desire. Our postmodern age is comparably
interested in the mobility of affect, or, following modernist Dinggedichte, the
possible superiority of representation to original as a source of vividness or a
standard of intensity. The Romantic philosophers after Kant rather understood
the necessity of representation to symbolize, as in Wordsworth's 'Immortality
Ode', an ultimate grounding exceeding representation and so only graspable
through affect rather than knowledge. And Coleridge was one of that postKantian company, involved in the controversies of just what was to count as a
legitimate exercise in ontological disclosure and what was not. In Wordsworth's
case, Coleridge always seemed to think that the jury was still o u t
Coleridge in the Land of Logic
3
Writing to T.S. Eliot at a time when he was finishing his own book on
Coleridge, IA. Richards told the poet that he had found what he wanted in
Coleridge but that he'd had to use a fair amount of coercion. Richards' book
was a critically epochal discussion that moderated major critical debates of his
time. Mine cannot claim that importance; but it does try in its more modest
way to use Coleridge in a comparably instrumental manner as the point of
many departures and returns, and looks for the same tolerance or latitude
from the reader. First it sets Coleridge's mode of thinking within a German
Romantic philosophical context as the place where his ideas can naturally
extend themselves, stretch and find speculations with which to compare
themselves. Secondly, it argues and it is hoped wins converts to the idea that
Coleridge found philosophical speculation in the dominant idiom of his times
exciting, vertiginous and as imaginatively engaging as poetry. We are accustomed to looking for the philosophical possibilities in poetry, encouraged by
that overriding ambition of writing a philosophical poem shared by Coleridge
and Wordsworth. But the siren power of philosophical writing, its indigenous
challenge to our responsive readerly constitution perhaps gets underestimated
or taken for granted in the Romantic rush to find in poetry the measure of
everything. Philosophy for Coleridge had to be already engrossing for its
poetic absorption to be so important an aim. 'Not only the poet but also the
philosopher has his raptures {EntzuckungenY wrote Schelling in The Ages of the
World?
Like most of us, if we could only admit it, Coleridge thought and wrote
largely vicariously: that is, he needed the vehicle of another person's system
to carry the freight of his own originality. If there is anything original in this
book, it is certainly thanks to Coleridge and the philosophers facilitating his
own self-expression. Not for Coleridge the stark Blakean antithesis of creation
of his own system or enslavement by another man's. Coleridge, when times
were fraught (most of the time) could express this dependency dramatically.
'My nature requires another Nature for its support, & reposes only in another
from the necessary Indigence of its being.' 3 But, in the philosophy of the
time, this drama was being extracted from its pathology and given theoretical
legitimacy. The notion that the creative act, however much it appeared to be
individual, was actually collaborative, was developed in different directions.
The Romantic construction of the unconscious (a performance once plausibly
attributed to Biographia Literaria by Catherine Belsey) endowed original
expression with an afterlife it could not have intended. 4 The critical reception's
extension of significance beyond a piece of writing's stated purpose, whether
that statement be the author's or the implication of the work's genre, removed
the writing from the jurisdiction of both. Nevertheless, new interpretations
and the critical fecundity of great art across time still reflected favourably upon
the artistic reserves of the maker. Neither subject nor object held sway here,
since the ontology of the work partook equally of both. Meanings which were
unconscious at the time of the work's inception were revealed to the artist by
his or her work, the object here taking priority. But these illuminations only
4
Coleridge and German Philosophy
made sense, only identified themselves, by illustrating things belonging to the
prior initiative that produced the work. This dramatic interchange, in which
an aesthetic work is always further realized by the efforts of others - vicariously - normalizes Coleridgean 'Indigence'. Formulated at critical moments
- in Friedrich Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragment 116 and almost simultaneously
at the crux of Schelling's System of 1800, plundered by Coleridge in Biographia
Literaria - this progressive dialectic of the unconscious unleashes the plurality
of self-expression.
Drama also underwrites the fact that the critical elaboration of an original
can take place in another idiom. Post-Kantianism did not consider that to
reinterpret was necessarily to reduce the living spirit of something to the dead
letter of exposition. The hard-won doctrine of aesthetic autonomy emerging
from Kant's third Critique and most memorably deployed by Friedrich Schiller
would seem to endorse this isolation of the aesthetic 'object' from subsequent
criticism of it. But post-Kantianism was a philosophical battleground in which
the master himself was subjected to the logic of the vicarious, or the various
ways in which his successors spoke through him or in his spirit. Coleridge
agreed with Kant that ideas of reason were uncontainable within our understanding; but he followed those who transformed the regulative effect to which
Kant restricted our apprehension of ideas into a sense of their progressiveness
and productivity. Ideas embodied 'an infinite power of semination'. Coleridge
had to devise a new rhetorical term to pinpoint the permanent ideality so
infinitely differentiated. He called it 'tautegory'. Tautegory could be used to
describe the expansion into many discourses, under the pressure of historical
difference, of an Absolute truth originally only revealed in one discourse.5
Coleridge notoriously tried to shuttle between poetry and philosophy, theology
and science, criticism, politics and just about everything else available. He
would have agreed, surely, with Friedrich Schlegel that poetry's inherently
dramatic dimension gave the lead to other discourses to collaborate, join
forces, amalgamate and help form the new mythology needed for intellection
to be adequate to modern reality.6
Coleridge's most comprehensive descriptors of this ambition were words
like Logos, Logosophia, anti-babel, even 'the last possible epic, The Fall of
Jerusalem'.7 For Friedrich Schlegel and the Jena group of 1798-1800, ideas were
'the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts', but this
drama was already recruiting a still wider cast.8 The 'anti-babel' is perhaps the
most fruitful of Coleridge's wish-list to pursue here. In the first paragraph of
the 'Transcendental Doctrine of Method' of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant
fascinatingly regarded the preceding 'Doctrine of Elements', or transcendental deduction of the conditions necessary for experience to be possible, as
an 'estimate (Vorrat) of the building materials' required for the Babel of pure
reason he had been critiquing. While we can think 'the idea' of such a totality,
the materials at our disposal restrict us to building on 'the plane of experience'
instead. More than this, though, 'the confusion of languages that unavoidably
divided the workers over the plan, and dispersed them throughout the world,
Coleridge in the Land of Logic
5
[left] each to build on his own according to his design'.9 Coleridge's notebook
entry 3254, examined in Chapter 4, must 'build' on Kant's metaphor. It was
precisely this given idea of experience that the post-Kantians, starting with
Fichte, wanted to understand progressively. They wanted to do this by breaking
down the isolation of discursive disciplines from each other, and getting them
to engage in dramatic dialogue. From Fichte onwards, ideas of production
began to circumscribe those of representation. Kant had analysed the manifold
necessary for cognition to work and the dialectical tractability of reality this
functionality was obliged to assume. His successors studied the dynamic
production of the former by the latter. Imprisoned as Kant thinks we are within
representation, the 'X' outside representation must be, as he says, 'nothing
for us'.10 Their answer to this ban is to develop out of Kant's other critiques
of aesthetic and teleological judgement a productive rather than representational paradigm of correspondence. The consequent striving of cognition to
get on terms with its own production energizes a drama present from Fichte's
Wissenschaftslehre (Science of Knowledge, versions from 1794 onwards) to Hegel's
1806 Phenomenology.11 Between these two, more and more discursive resources
are requisitioned for the task. The delegation or relay of purely philosophical
authority matches that of the subject. For of course the subject must be still
unconscious of what remains its potential, though a potential which, like
Schlegel's prophetic historian, we must think of as the productive future in our
past. We only need to look at the exorbitant criteria Coleridge sets the unfortunate Wordsworth for the creation of the philosophical poem he thought he
should have written instead of The Excursion to feel the exhilarating pressure of
the post-Kantian idea to create a concerted but indeterminate discursive front
in pursuit of ends of which it was evidently not fully conscious.12
If philosophy's ultimate task is to explain not only how we represent the
world, but how we think the production of those representations rather than
others, then it has something close to a creation-myth on its hands. This can
lead in many directions, not all of them doctrinal ones. For a Christian like
Coleridge, though, theoretical discourses closest to a theodicy would feel the
most benign. But while Coleridgean knowledge is, according to the famous
climax of the first volume of Biographia Literaria, a finite repetition of 'the
infinite I AM', this acceptance of being spoken is close to anxieties Coleridge
was voicing before reading the Germans, anxieties heard louder after he had
read them and published and re-published the mystery poems, 'The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner', 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan' in 1816-17. In the fourth
of the Philosophical Lectures of 1819, Coleridge sets out an acceptable version of
truth's divine ventriloquism.
/ know, intuitively know, that there is a power essential to my nature, and
which is 'I ought, I ought not, I should not', and that voice is original and
self-existent, not an echo of a prior voice (I mean the voice of prudential
self-love) but the very source out of which self-love must flow. (PhL, I,
178)
6
Coleridge and German Philosophy
This passage sounds uncharacteristically Fichtean in its reliance on conscience,
but the use of 'love' to validate our Very source7 suggests Schelling's moral
psychology. The mystery poems, though, play through various ideas of
repetition, and in their narratives the meaning of repetition ranges from
the progressive domestication of an original dynamism in 'Kubla Khan' to
the fear of an imposing instrumentalism evident in the other two. In T h e
Rime', puzzling in its mixture of arbitrariness and moralizing, 'an enigma
in the form of an explanation', repetition is the master-trope at all levels.13
However accepting and resigned the mariner's homily at the end appears, he
is nevertheless driven by the desire to re-tell his tale for his chosen audience, as
forcefully as the dead crew of his ship had been possessed to man their stations
again. Indeed, Anna Maria Cimitile has recendy argued from a knowledgeably
European theoretical perspective, that insofar as the poem's central fantasy
reflects upon itself in the poem it produces a spectral slavery.14 In the context
of Coleridge's post-Kantianism, the spectral quality of slavery in fact locates it
in Coleridge's deepest anxieties about the human power lovingly to accept its
determination or vocation. Far from dematerializing slavery, the spectral aspect
lets it stand for the most fundamental violation Coleridge could imagine - a
savage perversion of that amiable dispensation normally allowing us to enjoy a
self-determining human subjectivity in the act of representing its production
of us. As Cimitile states simply: 'Slavery is the absence of subjectivity'.15 That
the poem appears unconscious of its indictment of the slave trade lets slavery
figure for the post-Kantian philosopher the blighting of all past and future
sources of human possibility.
'Christabel' also dramatizes the fear of being spoken by another, here
presented as the unpleasant contraction of the individual, like a dove being
clasped by a snake, the movement of their breathing indistinguishable.
Geraldine, the snake, then substitutes for Christabel, the dove, and proves
her success by engaging in an otherwise incestuous dalliance with Christabel's
father, Sir Leoline. The impossibly elfin child at the end spells out the implications. 'Kubla Khan' moves through a succession of re-enactments of an
originally unfocused creative energy without reaching resolution. Coleridge's
three great mystery poems appear caught in a sceptical philosophical moment.
Their trademark reflexivity - the extent to which they are about their own
production - is curiously dubious about its own achievement Their circularity, far from providing exemplary images of self-production, suggests the
limitations of purely imaginative solutions and encourages a readership which
will be culturally urbane enough to appreciate this progressive self-criticism.
Certainly, this lx>ok argues in the next chapter, both Schelling on Dante and
Hegel on scepticism help us fill out a picture of the reading skills Coleridge's
poems require. Such skill is above all historicist: the talent to detect the
persistence of the past in the present, its creative repetitions constructed to a
new finitude, and gesturing towards a future. Schelling's fullest exposition of
this historicism took place in his unpublished masterpiece The Ages of the World
(Die Weltalter) which remained in draft form after his death. Coleridge, as the
Coleridge in the Land of Logic
7
editors of his Marginalia point out, would have heard of it because Schelling
describes his essay Ueber die GoUheiten von Samothrace as a supplement to Die
WeUaUer, and Coleridge read that.16 But Coleridge appears to find his own way
of expressing the historicist possibilities for Schellingian philosophy after the
Freedom essay and Schelling's reworking of its main thought against Jacobi in
the Denkmal a few years later. Coleridge calls the identity persisting through
historical changes an 'idea'; he thinks of the changes as 'infinite semination'.
The rhetorical figure capable of symbolizing such exchanges is a 'tautegory'.
The social class he invented to make the study of tautegory, or permanence
in progression, its profession and something it embodied, was to be the
'Qerisy'.
The road-map
The following chapters try to make good these claims about Coleridge and
the German philosophical context I use to explain each other.17 Inevitably
boosted by supplements from marginalia, letters and notebooks, which the
Bollingen edition of the Collected Coleridge makes so freely available, the book
focuses on central prose texts by Coleridge - Biographia Literaria, The Friend, the
Opus Maximum - and keeps re-examining some of the major poems along with
Coleridge's own conflicted analysis of Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode'. These
are the main areas of concentration. The first chapter writes Coleridge into
the German philosophical background with some determination. Hegel is a
neglected figure in Coleridgean studies. No wonder, since Coleridge only read
a few pages of his work. But Hegel, especially in his Phenomenology, remains
not only the foremost commentator on the speculations of his age, but makes
out of that commentary his own philosophy. For Coleridge's eclectic thinking
to be out of the loop here would therefore be unusual. One of the benefits
of the freedoms this book takes with a conventional history of ideas is to keep
Coleridge in the Hegelian picture to which he evidently belongs.18 Coleridge's
philosophizing only comes fully alive within the ambit of that of his avant-garde
German contemporaries. Coleridge's favouring of Schelling only reveals its full
force if we know about the intellectual quarrel between Schelling and Hegel.
All Coleridge's other intellectual borrowings and investments do not really
set up an alternative theoretical establishment: but they do fuel his power to
intervene in the dominant philosophical idiom of the time.
Schelling, though, was the post-Kantian philosopher of dynamic productivity
most congenial to Coleridge. The explanation of the two imaginations and
fancy central to Biographia Literaria lose their main philosophical force unless
they are referred back to Schelling's ontological explanation of the world as
the doubling and repetition in differentiated form of an original identity.
After Biographia Literaria, Coleridge began disparaging Schelling in earnest,
especially the scheme of Schelling's Freedom essay which was the published
8
Coleridge and German Philosophy
culmination of Schelling's philosophy up to that date (1809) and the basis of
its further development in unpublished seminars, written drafts and lectures
for the next 45 years. As Raimonda Modiano points out, Coleridge's letters
to J.H. Green distancing himself from Schelling seem founded on a reading
of the much earlier Einleitung of 1799. He also seems to buy into Jacobi's
argument that Schelling perpetuates the elenchia - or what Modiano calls a
'violation of hierarchical standards' - of deducing a superior power from an
inferior one.19 But it is the Freedom essay he admired that lies behind notebook
entries such as the following.
In short, Schelling's System and mine stand thus:- in the latter there are God
and Chaos: sind in the former an Absolute Somewhat, which is alternately
both, the rapid leger de main shifting of which constitutes the delusive
appearance of Poles ... (CAT, 4,4662)
Here, Schelling's polar logic is an illusion; so is Schelling's idea that God is
grounded in an Unconscious prior to putting on his individuality, a reserve
on which subsequent tautegorical repetitions draw. Coleridge, desiring more
explicit revelation, thinks this leaves 'all hanging in frivolous & idle sort.
Schwebend.' (CN, 4,4664)
This seems pretty clear-cut. Coleridge Christianizes Schelling's ontology,
replacing its logic with doctrine. Two considerations should give us pause
though. Firstly, as just noted, Coleridge was always fascinated in his poetry by
images of how fproductivity could go wrong, those scenarios of instrumentalism
from which we needed Christian virtue to rescue us. In other words, he appears
to look for ways of describing how we can seek the chaos behind benign
creativity, as if we could choose from it another creative purpose, one enslaving
others to its selfish interest. Secondly, Coleridge's use of tautegory, and (as we
shall see) Schelling's later appropriation of it, show him continuing to practise
Schelling's 'leger de main' in ways Schelling recognized and appreciated.
Coleridge, here as elsewhere, participates in post-Kantianism so as to
return it constantly to the issue of expression. His early dramatic writings are
already part of a project in line with his philosophical interests. When the
philosophy begins to enlist different discourses in the service of new standards
of theoretical adequacy, it translates the earlier sense of dramatic interplay into
its own idiom. Chapter 3, 'Drama as the Motor of Romantic Theory', examines
how this happens. Dramatic philosophy takes place in a setting traditionally
thought hostile to drama because of the typically Romantic habit of introspection. In fact, post-Kantian theory brings the two together, and the dialogic
quality of self-understanding, an idea going back to Shaftesbury, is explored.
The self, eluding conclusive representation, is more like a play we produce
than a single character. This insight connects with the larger post-Kantian
strategies for de;iling with questions of ontology.
The next chapter, 'Coleridge's Stamina', examines Coleridge's central
metaphor for the 'ideas' with which his writing - poetical, philosophical,
Coleridge in the Land of Logic
9
political - strove to get on terms. Usually, 'ideas' are tied exclusively to such
locutions of Coleridge and Goethe as 'the translucence of the general /
universal in the particular / individual'. The strains this claim for representation puts on its symbolism are evident, and the claims of symbol have been
conspicuously critiqued in twentieth-century theory from Walter Benjamin to
Paul de Man. I reconsider that critique and argue that it must not be allowed
to let the productive, historicist dimension contrived for symbol by Coleridge
and Schelling to be effaced. Then, in Chapter 5, Coleridge's literary autobiography, Coleridge's 'Coleridge', is read as a case study of Coleridge's power
to evoke the production of a self and to use it as a model for philosophical
understanding. His autobiography is presented as a biography, as a Biographia,
and that impersonality along with the writing's dramatic exercises in vicarious
expression are again argued to connect fruitfully with the complexities of the
post-Kantian critique of representation generally.
Around the time he published Biographia Literaria, Coleridge also projects
his 'rifacciamento' or re-making of The Friend. This endeavour is far more than
the 1818 revival of the periodical of a decade earlier. In renewing his idea of
philosophical friendship, Coleridge's plot appears to be, overall, to explore
the role of affect in philosophical explanation. His admiration for and distrust
of Kant's alleged Stoicism, already a topic in my earlier chapters, is clarified
through Coleridge's stipulation of relationship and communication as fundamental requirements of the concept of truth. There is a helpful conjuncture
here with recent postmodern discussions of friendship as the politics for an age
in which politics appears in need of rehabilitation.
How contemporary are Coleridge's philosophical concerns? Occasionally, I
find it necessary and easy to slip into the idiom of modern and postmodern
thinkers and their areas of interest (Heidegger and Wittgenstein on ontology,
Derrida on friendship, Deleuze on Stoicism). The penultimate chapter,
'Reading from the Inside', looks both at the details of Coleridge's construction
of 'tautegory' and at its transmission through different critical reading
practices and theory to the present day. While reading from inside an obligatory conceptual framework, European philosophy has always felt the need
to address our sense of these boundaries, and the kind of delegations of its
own authority it has to make to other discourses in order to evoke what for a
monologic philosophy, bound to the task of explaining the logic of representation, must, as we heard Kant say earlier, remain 'nothing for us'.
Many, though, have suspected this degree of philosophical inclusiveness
and generosity as it appeared in Schelling. Friedrich Engels, a member of
the audience of Schelling's late Berlin lectures, found him to be all things to
all people. 'Protean' is another ambiguous adjective to have been applied.
Karl Jaspers pointed out, more sympathetically, Schelling's trick of gesturing
as much outside his current system as making his present one cohere from
within. Schelling is currently in vogue. Two recent, indeed overlapping, books
on the 'new' Schelling - new as in the 'new' Nietzsche, Bergson and Sartre
- indicate an intensity of interest which builds on a continuous revival from
10
Coleridge and German Phibsophy
Heidegger onwards.20 Evident is a willingness to discount Schelling's apparent
mysticism in the interests of foregrounding something else: the discursive mix
it takes - aesthetic, ethical, mythological, psychoanalytical, theological - to
make that existential apprehension, discovered by philosophy but beyond its
powers of expression, remain credible. Coleridge in his way began the work
needing to be done here, with his ideas about tautegory.
Hegel, arguably, is always new. Certainly the episode of the Phenomenobgy
that his critics use to try to explode his system changes over time. Postmodern
thinkers like Deleuze elaborate a Stoic resistance to conceptual principle
intended to go beyond Hegel's power to control. For Alexandre Kojeve and
his existentialist followers it had been the master/slave episode which they
had tried to elaborate unmanageably. Otherwise a totalizing Hegel, intolerant
of the individual's right to resist generalization, supervenes. But still more
recently, re-appraisals like Gillian Rose's have theorized more persuasively the
saving gaps and theoretical openings in Hegel's logic so as to recover a truly
speculative Hegel. Hegel's self-departures from his own system, it is argued,
can be attributed to him. It is the peculiar nature of the speculative proposition, formally postulated but never investigated across different discourses,
that allows Hegel to take credit for the speculative provisionality his critics
have otherwise opposed to his system. Hegel, while writing across many
historical discourses in the Phenomenology, is reticent (and restricted to formal
investigation in the Science of Logic) about the implications for philosophical
expression of such speculation. Again, as with Schelling, this leaves work to be
done which Coleridge, with his inveterate recourse to discussions of language,
helps inaugurate.
The final chapter looks at Coleridge's mode of addressing the speculative problem at its broadest, using Schelling, Hegel and Wordsworth as
the most helpful points of orientation. Coleridge's conclusion that 'our
modern philosophy is spelling throughout' competes with the virtuosity of
Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode' when it tries to make poetry adequate to
the task of describing us Absolutely. In its approach to the poetic challenge,
philosophy, to use current analytic terminology, can be either foundational
or anti-foundational: it can claim a privileged grounding in truth or it can
be willing to delegate its authority in order to make possible the evocation of
what philosophy can uniquely think but not express. In the latter mode it can
concede to other ways of writing the function of ascertaining an Absolute that
by definition exceeds the powers of its own discernment. It can live vicariously.
Poetry, when epistemological on its own account, can only be foundational.21
When does one hear of poets opting for the strategically prosaic in order to get
across an especially poetic felicity? Coleridge worries that a foundational poetic
contact with what we Absolutely are, necessarily immediate, would render
such ultimate authenticity as a sort of nonsense, epitomized by Wordsworth's
'child Philosopher' of the 'Immortality Ode'. 'What we call knowledge', wrote
Schelling in the 'Introduction' to the third draft of the Weltalter, is 'more of
a striving toward knowledge than knowledge itself. like Wordsworth in his
Coleridge in the Land of Logic
11
famous remarks to Isabella Fenwick on the 'Ode', he described 'anamnesis'
as the goal producing this philosophical quest to get behind itself. Coleridge
worries that Wordsworth's own poetic striving towards the same Platonic goal
takes the immediacy of its own poetic success to be a sign of immediate epistemological success - what Tim Milnes calls 'a philosophy-transcending "poetic"
truth'.22
Another way of putting this, Hegel's way, is to say that immediacy, under
analysis, empties itself of the particular 'here and now' supposed to demonstrate its certainty. It becomes uniform and universal in its range of reference.
It is always the same because our guarantee of its truth is that it has no need of
mediating characteristics which might distinguish its examples and occasions.
Intriguingly, though, Schelling launched an attack on Hegel's entire system on
much the same grounds. There is, Schelling argued in his Lectures on Modern
Philosophy, a sameness about the presence of the Absolute at each stage of
Hegel's Phenomenology, a common principle of contradiction rather than a
something new each time on analogy with the continual development of a
personality out of an unconscious past. Schelling here is seeking to use the
philosophical nuclear option of the time against Hegel, the accusation of
Pantheism. God in everything means that everything, theologically, is the same.
Particular differences go by the board, as a truth for which mediation is irrelevant is therefore allowed to shine through all things in equal measure. This is
extremely close to Coleridge's attack on Wordsworth's 'Ode'. Pantheism does
not let us make sense of the world.
The speculative Hegel has his own means of escaping this attack. Wordsworth's
defence, or the best one that we can find for him, is to attack: to defeat philosophical
objection with the winning sufficiency of his poetry. Schelling and Coleridge could
argue that Wordsworth's bid for universal authority just looks eccentric. His 'Ode'
retains the particular, idiomatic character which it was its Absolute project to shed.
Wordsworth would do better to charge our ordinary usage with the numinous than
devise unbelievable characters and scenarios. Adorno commended a language that
in its descriptions could be simultaneously 'identical and non4dentical'. Resuming
the post-Kantian tradition, he argued that 'through the deity, language is transformed from tautology to language' P After Nietzsche, after theology, he must have
thought, we are still left with the burden of maintaining non-identity if language
is to flourish. To avoid tautology, our language has to cultivate in us, as Coleridge
wanted it to do, the power to respond to historical change without slavish acquiescence in the prescriptions of civilization we have inherited. Our 'cultivation' is
the central mission of the Clerisy in Coleridge's On the Constitution of the Oiurth
and State According to the Idea of Each (1830). But to opt out of identity altogether,
certain of our unaided, immediate poetic grasp of ourselves outside the limitatioris
of identity, won't do either. We cannot disport ourselves with Wordsworth's poetic
children in some utterly liminal landscape without hypostatizing in effect another
identity, an impossibly Absolute one.
So, finally, has Coleridge won and Wordsworth lost? The answer offered
by the post-Kantian thinking this book studies is that this contest is actually
12
Coleridge and German Philosophy
a collaboration. Both sides are part of a movement in which, over time, as
Schlegel and others argued, both can vacate their original positions for new,
more composite forms of speech. Wordsworth's poetry can tell us of our
unquenchable and self-defeating desires for our immediate reconciliation
with our destiny. Coleridge's philosophy heightens our sense of the impossibility of such a vocation and the strangely indefensible intellectual postures
to which it drives us. Wordsworth's poetry can then rid us of this feeling of
being ridiculous by its unanswerable exhibition of a need and longing which,
he persuades us, we do indeed experience. Coleridge questions the credentials
of that experience to call itself experience, and Wordsworth finds for those
doubts an existential expression. And so the process continues, tautegorically rather than tautologically, the same only different each time. Poetry and
philosophy are each other's extension. They are on the stage, at the same time,
in dramatic dialogue. The reader of both is the winner.
Chapter Two
Coleridge's Philosophical Moment
The Difference between Fichte and Schelling
When Coleridge excitedly told Thomas Poole in a famous letter of 1801 that he
had * extricated' the notions of Time and Space, and overthrown the doctrine of
the association of ideas or mainstay of British empiricist psychology along with
its (associated) determinist metaphysics, he was also describing his entry into
the arena of German philosophy.1 Not that the Germans noticed. For Coleridge,
though, the break was obviously revelatory. Crabb Robinson describes how 'a
German friend' listening to Coleridge's 1811 lectures convinced him that
'Coleridge's mind is much more German than English. My friend has pointed
out striking analogies between Coleridge and German authors whom Coleridge
has never seen .. ,'2 The corollary of this would be Coleridge's frequent claims
that he found Kant and the post-Kantians anticipated by earlier philosophers,
by Bruno, Boehme, the Cambridge Platonists and others. His point, although
expressed with his customary mixture of apology,rivalryand emulation, seems,
in effect, to be less about precedence and more about his enjoyment of the
contemporary German idiom in which he found perennial philosophical
concerns updated and historically expressive.
Coincidentally, in the same year as Coleridge's coup de foudne, Hegel was
also trying to extricate himself from his native philosophical inheritance. In
his essay on The Difference Between Fichtes and ScheUing's Systems of Philosophy, he
championed Schelling's development of the 'spirit' of Kant's philosophy over
Fichte's. In early letters (1795) to Hegel from the Tubingen Stift, the educational establishment he attended with Hegel and Holderlin, Schelling wrote of
an entrenched fidelity to the letter of Kant's philosophy, and of the contrary
need to discover the premises of which Kant's philosophy may have given the
result, but which it itself lacked.3 In the variable of 'spirit' also lay hidden the
growth that was to culminate in Hegel'sfirstmajor philosophical achievement,
the Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807. By then Hegel had broken with Schelling,
and Schelling was on the way to criticizing Hegel's own philosophy as too
idealist, too focused on conceptual possibility and neglectful of ontology: those
'premises' or ultimately prior explanations of the astonishing fact that anything
exists rather than what it has become. Potentially mystical, this ontological
focus on the determination or attunement (the German Bestimmungcarries the
14
Coleridge and German Philosophy
same vocational loading) of existence powered not only Kierkegaard's existentialism but also Marx's materialism, in which nature is characterized not by its
(Hegelian) logical essentials but by its potential to be historically transformed
into our authentic reality. Human beings, thought the young Marx, overcame
their alienation under capitalism by transforming nature into their proper
abode. Thus they allowed their true natural history - their determination
as a species being - to begin.4 Hegel's break with a Fichtean version of Kant
is one of the first moments provoking the new ways of thinking.5 Coleridge
sides with Schelling and Hegel against Fichte, and eventually with Schelling
against Hegel, although he can be placed illuminatingly within Hegel's
speculative history. The critique of Fichte, though, expresses itself as the
reinterpretation of Kant, and Coleridge shares this post-Kantian philosophical
self-understanding too.
According to Hegel in his 1801 Difference essay, Fichte's Wissenschaftslekre or
'Science of knowledge' drew the full implications latent in two related tenets
of Kant's philosophy. Kant thought that the categories of the understanding
possessed absolute jurisdiction in questions of knowledge. Kant also claimed
that a transcendental unity of apperception - an 'I think' accompanying all
acts of understanding - was necessary for any experience to be possible.
Experience had to belong, had to be someone's, could not be free-floating.
Joined together by Fichte, these two precepts generated the notion of an
Absolute subject or possessor of the exemplary experience. It is a short step to
say that knowledge and experience are nothing other than the self-positing of
this Absolute. Nature then becomes for Fichte merely the 'not-F, the negative
of self-projection, posited in order for understanding to have something to act
upon. What the self-conscious 'I' simultaneously knows is an effect of its own
activity. As long as that activity continues, the 'not-F will never be conclusively
understood. Schelling appropriated this picture of the production of reality
from a developing ground of which we are never fully conscious. But he took
the Fichtean striving out of the exclusively subjective realm at the expense of
the coherence of Fichte's system. This was no failure on Schelling's part, as
some commentators have thought, but what Schelling wanted to do - to reconceive ideas of philosophical adequacy outside received notions of system.6
In his final formulation, Fichte calls the production of 'not-F from T an
1
original duplicity'.7 In Hegel's critical view, such a merger only added another
tier to 'the philosophical construction' of the faculty doing the synthesis.8 To
try to amalgamate reflection with action in this way did not make Fichte's reality
any less ideal. Schelling thought Fichte failed, and exploited that failure. Hegel
thought that Fichte remained consistently a philosopher of reflection, and that
his system remained static and unhistorical as a result Hegel's own phenomenology exhaustively analysed all the historical varieties of self-consciousness
and the worlds they implied. But then he arguably doubled Fichte's negation
to show the reverse production of the 'I' from the 'not-I' or realm of 'Spirit'
(the not * not-I') whose progress was then recounted by the rest of his phenomenology. As soon as 'Spirit' becomes an independently productive agent, it
Coleridge's Philosophical Moment
15
is no longer just an epiphenomenon of the T , such as the 'not-I', but has
become the negation of that negation. Coleridge seems to have found his way
round these difficult negatives on his own. In a note to Fichte's Grundlage, he
asked pertinently: 'Is not a portion of the Obscurity of the Wissenschaftslehre
attributable to the choice of the "Ich" instead of Soul or Spirit?'
Coleridge's note then continues in Schellingian terms: 'With the T we habitually connect the present Potence of Consciousness'.9 Potenzen or potencies
were the different powers of the Absolute (in analogy with the mathematical
idea of numbers to the power of their squares, cubes etc.) as it manifested itself
at different levels of existence - mineral, chemical, animal, psychological. Hegel
preferred to record these variables as the history of Spirit. But in the Difference
essay Hegel appreciated Schelling's move to save nature from entire absorption
into the philosophy of the Fichtean subject. Nor did Schelling's nature exist
in itself, so as through some final potency to encompass subjectivity as well.
The Absolute was the identity of both subject and object: whatever continuum
they shared in order to make their comparison, identification or opposition
possible. This, at any rate, is the emphasis that distinguishes Schelling's earlier
Naturphilosophiefromthe Identitdtsphilosophie, 'identity philosophy', in which it
became incoporated. Coleridge's note to Fichte clearly places him inside this
debate, exercised by its options and possible variants.
Coleridge's marginalia tend to be aggressive. He affects astonishment at Kant's
betises. Fichte is roundly castigated and repeatedly compared unfavourably with
Kant. So is Jacobi, and his attack on the Kantian and post-Kantian tradition
in Uber die gottlkhen Dinge is marked down as ungenerous despite its evident
anti-Pantheistic stance. But then Jacobi is defended in Coleridge's notes to
Schelling's response in his Denkmat, and, generally, Coleridge's hostility to
Schelling grows in proportion to the closeness with which his thought glosses
Coleridge's own fundamentally religious orientation. It is just after his copious
use of Schelling and criticism of Fichte in Biographia Literari