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

Comparative Literature, Fall 1999 by Milnes, Tim

In consequence, existence for Hegel is "self-identical determinateness" (34); it is entirely relational, a product of the notion's estrangement from, and return to, itself. Coleridge's scheme, however, lacks the negative dynamic of alienation and return characteristic of the Hegelian triad. Instead, it is organized according to an idea of grammatical completeness rooted in his theory of the unity of language and reality in the divine Logos.15 Thus, the Prothesis corresponds to the infinite "I am"; the Thesis to the "thing," or object; the Antithesis to I act"; the Mesothesis to "to act"; and the Synthesis to "acting" (Aids 180).

The reasons for this peculiarity in Coleridge's logic are by now obvious. First, Coleridge remained, like Schelling, a foundationalist: he believed that mediately justifiable true beliefs are true only to the extent that they are traceable to true beliefs that are immediately justifiable. Consequently, he deploys a grounding, rather than a teleological, absolute (moving from rather than towards it), and thereby introduces the problem of how absoluteness can be creative (and therefore, simultaneously, non-absoluteness), a problem which Hegel had endeavoured to circumvent.

The second remarkable feature of the pentad represents an even greater error from a Hegelian perspective, and springs directly from Coleridge's voluntarism. For Coleridge, the identity of the Prothesis is beyond conceptualization; it is "transcendent to all production" (emphasis added), or the "Punctum invisibile, et presuppositum." Consequently, it is "INEFFABLE." This is precisely the kind of mistiness that dialecticism is designed to overcome. It is a central and well-known concern of Hegel's that the absolute could be articulated: for him nothing is worth knowing that cannot be known rationally, i.e. within a dialectical system in which absolute truth is immanent. In his view, "[t]he True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is . the spontaneous becoming of itself" (Phenomenology ll).16

Because he was haunted by the image of the "self-sentient looking-glass" with its infinite regress of reflexivity, Coleridge could never be a coherentist about truth. He may have discarded the empirical "given" of Kant's sensory manifold, but the voluntarism required to preserve Christian faith would not allow him to reject dualism wholesale, and with it the notion of a foundational "other," whether that "other" was the transcendent divinity, the ineffable identity of the Prothesis, or the "Trans-Alpine" provinces of the Biographia (1: 236). Once again, then, his system was torn between two impulses: first, the need to be a system; and, second, his concern to preserve a transcendent and ineffable ground towards which will, in the form of faith, might turn.

Conclusion

Coleridge's long-term philosophical problems should be seen as the product of the clash between, on one hand, his Christian reverence for the "invisible" nature of things, and, on the other, his need for unity, and thus for some apodeictic and universal philosophical system. His theosophy bears throughout the marks of being torn between the contrary demands of creationist religion and logical completeness, between a voluntarism constructed around Kant's account of practical reason and a global logic or architectonic that had re-emerged in the post-Kantian ideal of the philosophical articulation of the absolute, either in the form of intellectual intuitions of absolute grounds or through dialectic. Coleridge's failure as a philosopher can be traced to the impossible task of reconciling voluntarism with dialectic by somehow drawing the notion of an absolute will through the "looking-glass" of Polarity.