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

Comparative Literature, Fall 1999 by Milnes, Tim

Yet it is this very fusion of so many strands of contemporary thought that makes Coleridge such a fascinating figure both to the comparativist and the historian of philosophy. In the end, the question of the overall coherence of his work is perhaps not as interesting as the fact that his thought incorporates elements similar to those found in post-Kantian German philosophers as different as Hegel and Schopenhauer, though he knew little of the former and nothing of the latter. Moreover, threads of argument, laced up so confusingly in his own work, would later unwind to form distinct and long since recognized themes in nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophy and theory: dialecticism led to a concern with logical or linguistic reflexivity that still preoccupies modern theorists, while Romanticism's darker discourse of will gave birth to a hermeneutics of suspicion that has persisted from Freud and Nietzsche to the present day. It is hardly surprising, then, that the inheritors of the legacies of Hegel and Schopenhauer should find much of interest, and indeed, of sympathy, in Coleridge's mature speculations. Yet Coleridge's confusions and inclusiveness also make it impossible to press-gang his reputation into any single camp-and this, despite otherwise persuasive attempts to read his work non-logocentrically or as part of an "anti-dualist" tradition in western philosophy.17 Indeed, it is the Protean nature of Coleridge's thought, "modifiable into a thousand forms," rather than its argument, that makes it the uncertain and selfconscious forebear of both the methodologies that we bring to it and modern theory's desire to see itself reflected there.

1 The writing of this article was greatly assisted by the comments of Roy Park and the two anonymous readers for this journal.

2 For further discussion of the Biographia Literaria's "missing deductions," see Reid, "Coleridge and Schelling"and Milnes, "Eclipsing Art."

3 Boulger sees Coleridge as an Anglican "voluntarist traditionalist" (43) and Modiano refers to 'Coleridge's voluntaristic philosophy" (195).

4 In this passage, written for Joseph Henry Green, Coleridge also claims that "The Ground of Man's nature is the Will in a form of Reason" (2: 1368).

5 See Kant, Practical Philosophy: "the concept of a being that has free will is the concept of a causa noumenon. . ." "But because no intuition, which can only be sensible, can be put under this application, causa noumenon with respect to the theoretical use of reason is, though a possible, thinkable concept, nevertheless an empty one" (184). Kant argues that concepts that cannot be schematized in intuition, such as objective freedom-which is simply "unconditioned causality," "which for theoretical purposes would be transcendent (extravagant)" (224) -can only be realized through the moral law, and thus practically.

6 Muirhead wrote of Coleridge that Hegel's system "had far more points of agreement than of conflict with his own" (88-9), though Coleridge himself seems to have had little interest in the philosopher. Wellek, on the other hand, dismissed Coleridge's dialectics as "all empty mysticism of numbers" (80). More recently, McNiece has repeated the comparison with Hegel (25), while De Paolo (81) and McKusick (94) have traced dialectical method through Coleridge's theories of historv and language respectively.