Through the looking-glass: Coleridge and post-Kantian philosophy

Comparative Literature, Fall 1999 by Milnes, Tim

Introduction

In conversation with Henry Nelson Coleridge in 1831, Samuel Taylor Coleridge offered the following assessment of his philosophical achievements:

My system is the only attempt that I know of ever made to reduce all knowledges into harmony; it opposes no other system, but shows what was true in each, and how that which was true in the particular in each of them became error because it was only half the truth. I have endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth and frame a perfect mirror. (Table Talk 1:248)

This is a revealing statement, and not the least so because of its diverging implications. The general picture-of Coleridge having harmonized all systems of knowledge in a grand synthesis by bringing out what was "half" true in each-is strikingly Hegelian in appearance. This is offset, however, by the image of the philosopher framing a "perfect mirror," suggesting an underlying notion of truth as a matter of correspondence between the mind and something other than itself, rather than the coherentist theory defended by Hegel. A similar tension is evident between Coleridge's conviction that he has succeeded in assembling a unified "system" and his awareness of the fragmentary, incomplete nature of the "knowledges" that have gone into its construction. Elsewhere, indeed, he cites the very limitations of consciousness as evidence of the constitutive role of conscience in knowledge. Without the involvement of a free act of will (or faith), the self was merely, as he noted in 1825, "a Proteus, modifiable into a thousand forms," each of which was "a representation, of a somewhat that is not myself," or a kind of endlessly deferred, "self-conscious self-sentient looking- glass" (Notebooks 4: note 5280).

Remarks such as these bear witness to the delicate balance that Coleridge's later thought attempted to maintain between two major themes in post-- Kantian German philosophy: the methodology of dialectic and the ontology of will. That an English poet of the period would undertake such an enterprise is remarkable, and in Coleridge's case all the more so, since his acquaintance with the philosophical figures most closely associated with these currents-Hegel and Schopenhauer-was fleeting in the first instance, and non-existent in the second. Yet, while in Germany the role of the professional philosopher had been energized by the task of working through the implications of Kant's "Copernican revolution," in England the withering of the philosophical appetite after Hume's dismantling of knowledge meant that the task of constructing an ideology of a post-revolutionary culture, whether social or metaphysical, fell largely to poets, essayists and journalists. This trend helps explain the emergence, in the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of a self-consciously philosophical poetry, determined not by form alone but also by content. Coleridge's contact with German thought at the end of the eighteenth century complicates matters even further, however, for he was encouraged at first by what he read there to theorize this new development in English poetry along Schillerian lines. The collapse of Coleridge's attempt in Biographia Literaria (1817) to emulate Schelling's project to reconcile notions of aesthetic freedom with the pantheistic principles of Naturphilosophie in fact marks the beginning of his intensified interest in dialectic and will, both of which were already present in that early work.2

Increasingly convinced that spiritual being occupied a ground inaccessible to philosophy, and turning from art to religion as the expression of this, Coleridge set out on what became the central endeavor of his later work: to establish a new doctrine of theosophy by habituating philosophy to religion, and making religion amenable to philosophy. It was vital to this undertaking that neither realm eclipse the other: the marriage of the two should be a harmonization, not a hypostasis. Accordingly, one of the central aims of the Philosophical Lectures of 1818-19 was to show "that as religion never can be philosophy, because the only true philosophy proposes religion as its end and supplement, so on the other hand there can be no true religion without philosophy. . ." (264). By achieving this harmonization, he hoped finally to defeat the philosophies of mechanism and complete the logical propaedeutic of Kant without succumbing to the impieties of absolute idealism.

Although in time Coleridge came to realize that the kind of system he had been developing was just as jealous of religion's domain as it was of art's, his need for a system per se never quite disappeared. Indeed, his desire to construct a universal organon, in the manner of Spinoza, Leibniz, and even Schelling, in which the unity of hitherto scattered fragments of particular truths might be demonstrated, reflects the extent to which he had inherited the priorities of the Enlightenment. Again, very much like his German contemporaries, Coleridge struggled with questions of history and teleology thrown up by a culture still coming to terms with the idea of revolution. In the work of the Anglican Coleridge, however, this struggle was rooted in the soil of an established national religion, giving rise to a Christian theodicy of providence and redemption. Linked with this belief was his desire to give an account of humanity as progressive, and possessed a priori of an absolute and more purposive freedom than Rousseau's idea of the collective will would allow. In general, as Nigel Leask has noted, the politics of Coleridge's later thought are represented by the replacement of a model of democratic imagination by one of a theocracy of higher reason, in which the intuition of reality is reserved for a select group of initiates. The cost of maintaining such a system, however, was high indeed, and Coleridge struggled to develop an entirely new account of reason which would mediate between philosophy and religious faith, or between the competing claims of an organic, absolute idealism and a nonconceptual field of experience traditionally preserved by Christian dualism. These difficult relations condense into the tension between the dialectical and voluntaristic axes in his work.