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

Comparative Literature, Fall 1999 by Milnes, Tim

It is instructive briefly to compare Coleridge's predicament here with Schopenhauer's The World as Will, and Representation, first published in 1818 (the same year as Coleridge's revised, three-volume Friend). Famously Schopenhauer saw humanity as leading a double life: as will and as representation, or knowledge. Since representation for Schopenhauer is simply will in its objectivity, any notion of the thing-in-itself as an object beyond representation was unfounded. Once this is realized, Schopenhauer claimed, both Kant's notion of the material "given" in perception and the meaningless post-Kantian talk of absolute grounds and intellectual intuitions can be eliminated. Because all perception is inherently intellectual, will is known intuitively, though not indeed as it is in itself Schopenhauer scathingly dismisses both Schelling's "cloud-cuckoo-land" theorizing over "the 'absolute"' and Hegel's "historical philosophy," which fruitlessly inquires into "the whence, whither, and why of the world . . . " (1: 273-74).

However, there is a flip-side to Schopenhauer's argument, one which helps to reveal a dark undercurrent in Coleridge's own thought. Schopenhauer's philosophy is, if not nihilistic, extremely pessimistic, attempting to embrace in full the implications of an ontology founded on a will that was nothing but pure activity. As such, will had neither ground nor purpose, other than its own movement. An invisible, universal force, it was not so much something to be revered, as something to which one must be resigned. In this post-Kantian concept of dynamic will Coleridge had tapped into a disturbing stream of Romantic thought: the idea of a power that was blind to morality and teleology and that would not, as Schopenhauer pointed out, easily enter into partnership with reason. As he argues, "only a blind, not a seeing, will could put itself in the position in which we find ourselves" (2:579).

These were the dangers of a philosophy based upon a reverence of the invisible as an act of becoming, a predicament made even more difficult by Coleridge's unhappy attempt to secure this act to an absolute ground. Yet at this point the notion of "alterity within indifference" reveals a further dimension to Coleridge's theosophy, one that complicates his thought still further by drawing him closer to the very philosopher whose work Schopenhauer described as a "monument to German stupidity" (1: 428), namely Hegel.

Dialecticism and absolute grounds

After the failed deduction of the Biographia, what Coleridge required was a satisfactory means of explaining coherent synthesis in knowledge and the organic growth of the universe-something that would satisfy his contention in the 1818 Friend that "all Method supposes A PRINCIPLE OF UNITY WITH PROGRESSION, in other words, progressive transition without breach of continuity . . " (1: 476). He was convinced that part of the answer must lay with the will as a metaphysical principle, yet it was also clear that will alone could not provide structure and direction to either knowledge or reality. Coleridge's solution to this problem also constitutes his ultimate debt to the philosopher he had attacked so vigorously in the Biographia; for it was Fichte who had developed the "antithetic" or dialectical procedure to explain the progress of the "I" towards self-identity. Fichte's major concern, as noted above, was Kantian and epistemological: he left any experience of the identity of knowledge and existence to practical reason alone. Coleridge, on the other hand, required an ontology. Moreover, he needed a system that was not alternately dialectical and voluntaristic, like Fichte's, but the synthesis of both. Nonetheless, Fichte's description of the antithetic procedure coincided with Coleridge's emerging view of the reflexive manner by which reality developed from the self-differentiating, dynamic potential of the divine Logos, in which both word and meaning, language and reality, were unified. The Schelling of the "identity" philosophy had signally failed to account for this growth in his strange view of the absolute as at once unified, divided, and the indifference of unity and division.14