“CONSCIOUSNESS HAS THE APPEARANCE OF ANOTHER”
On Relationality as Love
There are at least three discrete models that Samuel Taylor Coleridge develops by way of articulating the intrinsic relatedness of the human person. A first has to do with the love between human beings and the question of whether the insistence of (potentially unilateral) desire negates or is compatible with personhood. A notebook entry of October 1820 frames the question as follows: “Is true genuine Love of necessity RECIPROCAL? that is, can I really be in Love with a woman, whom I know, does not love me?” By “love,” Coleridge means “exclusive sexual Attachment . . . of a refined & honorably honest Man, which is exclusively felt to some one Woman; & vice versa.” As one would expect, however, Coleridge soon leaves the realm of the conventional and probes into that “where-in . . . this Love consist[s]. What is its universal cause, its indispensable Condition?” In the first of two answers, Coleridge follows Plato’s Phaedrus by focusing on the apparent complementarity of the two lovers, “the yearning after that full and perfect Sympathy with the whole of our Being which can be found only in a Person of the answering Sex to our own” (CN, no. 4730). Arguably, for Plato’s “natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer” (Phaedrus, 246a6–7) heterosexuality does not exactly constitute the strict requirement that Coleridge makes it out to be; even so, the key Platonic conception of love as a “yearning” for the completion of the soul is unaffected by such technicalities and remains a central feature of Coleridge’s argument here. Two implications, again Platonic in nature, follow from this scenario: “1st. that no human individual is self-sufficing (αὐτάρκης): 2ndly, that the consciousness and impulsive Feeling of this Self-insufficiency increases is more awakened, is stronger & more active in proportion as the to the natural Sensibility & fineness . . . of the Individual” (f7v). The Platonic notion of an ascent through ēros thus not only compels us to infer the fact of our “Self-insufficiency” but, for its ultimate success, also requires our conscious and explicit acknowledgment of that fact: “In a pure & harmonious Being noble mind, the sense of his its Self-insufficingness, the sense that it is of itself homo dimidiatus, but half of a compleat Being, exists consciously, becomes & with reflection.”1 By contrast, in a self actuated merely by an “instinctive Sense of Self-insufficingness” any rational and ethical ascent will be forestalled by a “turbulent Inquietude of mere Appetite” that lacks all regard for its object.
Bearing thus far a notable affinity to Hegel’s characterization of desire as the first manifestation of self-consciousness (viz., in the modality of a “drive” and thus as yet devoid of its own concept), Coleridge’s argument now takes a rather different turn.2 A desire that has not grasped its own underlying condition signals a twofold lapse or failure of the person, as both a rational and an ethical agent. For if “to love means signifies no more than an appetite represented to the eye or Imagination under the form, of which accidentally excites it” (f9), then the conflation of the true notion or Begriff (i.e., desire) with its transient and accidental object reveals a failure to “reflect” as a rational agent. As Martin Buber would put it, “love does not attach to the ‘I’ in such a way that it has the ‘Thou’ merely for its content or object; rather, it is between ‘I’ and ‘Thou.’”3 Simultaneously, in so confining itself merely to an appetitive taking-hold-of its incidental object of desire, the self also fails to realize that desire cannot be actualized through an act of possession but only in the modality of a relation—one that would have to involve, and acknowledge as such, the other as a person of reciprocal and equal reality. This originally Platonic insight which, as remains to be seen, makes a striking (albeit inflected) reappearance in Emmanuel Levinas’s account of “metaphysical desire,” prompts Coleridge to continue as follows:
rational Living Beings have no other means of Union but Sympathy & Inter-communication . . . in the same moment, same kind, same Degree, <and> one and the same Act, to receive & to give, to give what I receive, to receive what I give. Defin Understand Union in this sense—& then I say—that Love is the Desire of my whole all my Being to be united to some other Individual as the (conceived as alone capable of perfecting my being) in its our present finite state, by all the means which Nature dictates Reason, & Duty, permit or dictate. (CN, no. 4730, f12v)
There will be occasion later on to explore Coleridge’s profound conviction that the human person differs from all other animated life by its having reason over and above the computational and calculative faculty of the understanding, as well as his neo-Platonic interpretation of that very fact as evidence of the human being’s metaphysical destiny; as he puts it in his Opus Maximum, “Reason is the presence of God to the <Human> Will independent of its unity with the divine will” (172). One of his favored ways of drawing the distinction between reason and the understanding is to apply the law of non-contradiction: one individual’s understanding of a given issue may certainly differ from that held by any number of other individuals, or indeed from its own, earlier conceptions. Yet reason only signifies to the extent that the beings capable of it are taken to be related in joint acknowledgment of reason as a transcendent, unified, and normative idea. Whereas “a Will that does not contain the power of opposing itself to another Will is no Will at all, . . . a Reason that did contain in itself a power of opposing a Reason, or of not being one with it, would be no Reason” (OM, 172). Coleridge here touches on the relation of reason to truth, and he specifically rejects the modern perspectivalist and pluralist argument that rationality is itself contingent on, and determined by, inherently non-rational (material) factors such as race, gender, ethnicity, material circumstances, and so forth.
While all of these factors are obviously of enormous influence as regards the kinds of questions particular individuals ask, and the projects they conceive and pursue, attempts to dissolve reason into historically and materially conditioned perspectives fail inasmuch as they cannot account for the human person’s fundamental drive to make herself or himself understood, and so achieve reality and recognition as an ethical being, by another person or community of persons. One individual’s reason cannot be opposed to someone else’s because it “dwells in us only as far as we dwell in it. It cannot in strict language be called a faculty [because it] . . . is incompatible with individuality, or peculiar possession” (OM, 167). The point builds on Aids to Reflection, where Coleridge had specifically noted that in all other contexts of human intelligence “we add the epithet human without tautology: and speak of the human Understanding . . . But there is, in this sense, no human, Reason. There neither is nor can be but one Reason, one and the same” (AR, 218). For Coleridge, then, both love and reason are inextricably entwined noumena, not phenomena; and it is only as persons—not as autonomous “subjects”—that human beings may indirectly participate in that noumenal realm, viz., in the inherently relational modality of action. Neither love nor reason amounts to some subjectively held conception; rather, each manifests the vertical relation that the individual qua person has to the divine. It is no surprise, then, to find Coleridge putting stress on love’s non-proprietary, reciprocal, and intuitive acknowledgment of its metaphysical source. With manifestly Platonic overtones, Coleridge notes how the truth of love (as well as of reason) cannot be syllogistically proven but only phenomenologically experienced as a “co-alescence of all our Powers & Receptivities,” resulting from “a secret Intuition of a Sympathy” with another being, a union of “the Person with the Person” (CN, no. 4730, f14v). Conversely, not even the most sophisticated understanding and discursive intelligence can possibly yield an adequate grasp of person; for “in human law . . . <inquiry is not made concerning> the quantity of knowledge and the degree of intelligence, but whether the individual is a person or not; and this is determined by the presence of Reason in reference to the Will, and of the Will in its bearings on the Reason” (OM, 174). As Coleridge clearly understands, rationality and relationality are corollaries, and to the extent that the individual achieves full personhood it will reflexively come to realize as much.
Before moving on to Coleridge’s second instance of person as the relational and rational mode of existence of an incommunicable nature—viz., in the relation of “I” to “Thou”—we need to return once more to Richard of St. Victor; for it is in Richard’s De Trinitate that the italicized terms are found to have been jointly and coherently articulated for the first time. Having “move[d] the metaphysical center of the discussion from individual substance to interpersonal love as constitutive of divine being,”4 Richard in Book 4 of De Trinitate scrutinizes person by inquiring into its “mode of being” (modus essendi) and its “mode of origination” (modus obtinendi). In De Trinitate, 4.6, he thus distinguishes between animal (substantia animata sensibilis), human being (homo-animal rationale mortale) and person. While the latter certainly includes all the criteria already introduced for animal and human being (animation, sensibility, mortality, rationality), it is not adequately captured by them. For by person we “understand a unique and singular substance” (unam solam substantiam et singularem aliquam). Like Boethius, Richard distinguishes between the implication of “general” and “special” properties, and “the term ‘person’ [implies] the property of individuality, singularity, and incommunicability” (ad nomen autem persone proprietas individualis, singularis, incommunicabilis [De Trinitate, 4.7]). Yet for Richard, these latter criteria are not traits or “accidents” but, instead, signify a unique and “incommunicable” mode of being. Because substance always names a “what” (aliquid) rather than a “who” (aliquis), it is inherently inapplicable to an understanding of person. As regards the meaning of person within the context of the Trinity, the temptation to conceive it in terms drawn from our quotidian experience of human persons—who manifestly differ in body and temperament (in natura humana, quot personae, tot substantie [De Trinitate, 4.8])—would seem to compel assigning each of the three divine persons a separate substance. Though well aware that Boethius had already sought to disaggregate natura and substantia, Richard nonetheless insists that the latter term should simply be abandoned, if for no other reason than that a definition of person employing it could never be applicable to both the human and divine realm: “for it is more correct to call that which is the principle of all substance an essence rather than [again] a substance” (rectius essentia quam substantia dici potest [De Trinitate, 4.23]).
In lieu of “substance,” Richard introduces the concept of “existence” (De Trinitate, 4.12–13), which features two aspects, viz., the “mode of being” (modus existendi) and the “mode of origination” (modus obtinendi). In carefully parsing the “two aspects” (gemina consideratione) encapsulated in the term “existence”—viz., a person’s persistence or continuity as a singular being (its modus existendi) and its origination (ex/sistere) as that distinct being—Richard understands person as, literally, a “standing-out-from.”5 In the case of the divine persons, of course, the mode of origination is not only unique but altogether unfathomable and “incommunicable” (habens divinum esse ex proprietate incommunicabili). The latter term, first introduced by Boethius, now moves to center stage and becomes effectively coterminous with the meaning of person. In what follows (De Trinitate, 4.22–25), Richard skillfully connects all the pertinent criteria in play: person is incommunicable, singular, rational, and its reality is inseparable from its existence. Thus there can be no virtual or hypothetical person, but only the individua existentia, for its integrity derives not from some external trait or set of features predicatively ascribed to it but, instead, inheres in its very “mode of being,” even as this very fact itself is shared by all persons (existere per se solum commune est omnibus individuis [De Trinitate, 4.24]). Richard’s definition of person “as a rational existence of incommunicable nature” (rationalis nature incommunicabilis existentia [De Trinitate, 4.23]) thus fulfills one of his main objectives, viz., to arrive at a definition of person that is equally applicable to God and to human beings.6 Behind that objective stands his assumption—anticipated by Plato and Plotinus, and later echoed by the Cambridge Platonists and, eventually, Coleridge—that the phenomenology of human psychological experience is intrinsically related, indeed metaphysically indexed to the divine realm of the Trinity. Thomas McFarland thus situates Coleridge’s phenomenology of the human person as a staging area for his ultimate concern with understanding the Trinitarian God: “the closer Coleridge approached to a rational disposition of the idea of the Trinity . . . the more urgent became his investigations into the structure of human personality, which was to be extrapolated into the Trinitarian truth” (OM, cxxxvi); and a second instance of that vertical orientation, to be found in Coleridge’s Opus Maximum, now stands to be considered.
For the most part, of course, the link between Richard of St. Victor and Coleridge has to do with their joint exploration of person as rational, constitutively relational, and actualized interpersonally; such knowledge as Coleridge had of Richard’s work was almost certainly arrived at indirectly, through Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann’s History of Philosophy.7 Still, Richard’s central intuition—“that the person is most human—and most divine—when he transcends himself in love for another person”—crucially informs Coleridge’s late writings, particularly in the notebooks and the Opus Maximum.8 Specifically, in his discussion of the mother-child relation Coleridge construes the lateral and reciprocal dynamic of parental love as evidence of a vertical, metaphysical connection between finite human beings and a Platonic notion of the good. The same argument also shapes Coleridge’s more abstract account of the relation between I and Thou, which in turn can be seen as the template for his rich phenomenological account of “conscience,” to be considered later. What Ewert Cousins portrays as Richard’s “shift from a spirituality of ‘isolationism’ or ‘rugged individualism’ to a community-based spirituality” had also preoccupied Coleridge since his early days as a poet.9 Beginning with his so-called “Conversation Poems,” Coleridge approaches “spirituality” as a wide spectrum of affective and intellectual perplexities that implicitly call for a sustained hermeneutic of the “self”—understood not as modernity’s autonomous and self-possessed cogito but “in the absolute meaning of ‘Self’ as the perpetual antecedent within us” (OM, 31), also known as the will. As we have already seen, in positing the will as the “inexplicable and incomprehensible . . . ground of all reasonings and conclusions” (OM, 32), Coleridge seeks to avoid voluntarism’s conception of the will as a wholly irrational, quasi-mechanistic mental compulsion. As Coleridge notes, virtually all of Christian theology holds that “the absolute Will and the Supreme Reason are One, and it is the identity of these which we att mean, adoring rather than expressing, by the term of God.” Precisely that identity is lacking in human agency or in “a person” due to both “imperfection and privation.” Consequently, the finite, embodied will stands vis-à-vis the good in a relation of continued and palpable estrangement, “palpable” because the loss is intuitively felt as a dissonance of sorts. As a “finite Will,” that is, the human person cannot be understood “otherwise than in some relation to a co-present reason, but yet capable of being conceived in a relation of difference and contrariety to it.” Conversely, “Reason is the presence of God to the <Human> Will independent of its unity with the divine Will.” Regardless of how highly evolved our understanding or computational intelligence, the question of “whether the individual is a person or not . . . is determined by the presence of the Reason in Reference to the Will, and of the Will in its bearings on the Reason” (OM, 169, 172, 174).
To have a will thus means to be conscious, at least nascently so, of that very “difference and contrariety”—that is, of its imperfection, its responsibility, and its being ordered toward a telos that it can never reach under its own powers alone. Coleridge uses the Augustinian image of spoiled wine to show that one cannot speak of “corruption without implying the absence of something that should have been” (OM, 170). It is just this tension between the actual development that did occur and the ideal one occluded by that very fact that also informs Coleridge’s Dante-inspired quatrain entitled “Where is Reason?” of 1820–1821:
Whene’er the Self, that stands twixt God and Thee,
Defecates to a pure Transparency
That intercepts no light and adds no stain—
There Reason is; and then begins her reign!10
Here the “self” is indeed the obstruction, the occlusion or Dantean “false imagination” (falso imaginar) that prevents it from seeing. Thus, in what is surely the poem’s most startling line, “Defecates to a pure Transparency,” the self must expel itself as the presumptive focus of attention—of mere “understanding” or “mind of the flesh” (phronēma sarkos)—if reason is to be accessed. It cannot abide within the sheer finitude of volition and desire but, instead, must grasp its own will as the true focus of awareness. Coleridge’s frequent recourse to Romans 7:24 (“O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” [Infelix ego homo quis me liberabit de corpore mortis huius]) in his late notebooks shows him wrestling with the dualist implications of body and soul to the very end. Yet while that antagonism is never resolved, his dark depiction of the body as “a moveable Dungeon with Windows, and Sound-holes” is not taken as evidence (as it had been by Schopenhauer some years earlier) of the soul’s determinacy by the body. In fact, Coleridge regards the body’s material scaffolding as a providential foil whereby the modern, Cartesian fantasy of a pure (unembodied), seemingly deiform human intellect is corrected and the body recognized as “an Interpreter of our communion with lower Natures” (CN, no. 5671).11
Embodied existence, though inescapable and often a torment (certainly to Coleridge), is less a plain fact than a Wittgensteinian “case” (Fall) for the human mind. Its phenomenology, not its material ontology, is what occupies, indeed positively enables the development of mind from the merely computational understanding to the responsible will that is the fulcrum of moral personhood. As long as sin “is not asserted to or consented with by the Conscious Will,” embodied existence (“the phantom Self of his Nature—i.e. the Ground, the Hades”) proves of vital importance in effecting authentic introspective tendencies: “yet it is most salutary and needful that he should contemplate and regard as Sin” (CN, no. 6304). Far from being the simple, efficient cause of Hobbes and Schopenhauer, the embodied, human will amounts to a complex hermeneutic phenomenon; and it is generative of self-awareness because it is a trace of the identity (of will and reason) from which, as something finite and created, the self has become estranged. The self’s phenomenology thus shows it to be constantly nudged toward awareness of both its lateral, empirical relation to other persons and, providentially, toward grasping its vertical relation with the divine. Such a movement, however, can only unfold as a conflict registering in the conscience as the presence of “sin” and, belatedly, as “guilt” and “remorse.” Coleridge certainly would have concurred wholeheartedly with Kierkegaard’s remark that “an ethic which ignores sin is an altogether useless science.”12 Inevitably, then, to accord the human person a will is to invest it with a “responsible Will”: “man is a responsible agent, and in consequence hath a Will. Have I a responsible Will? Concerning this each individual must <himself> be exclusively <both> querist and respondent” (OM, 54).
As in St. Augustine’s Confessions, however, the task of self-scrutiny proves all but inseparable from the relation that the self bears to others and, hence, from the ethical imperative—always felt, though frequently not honored—to acknowledge the reality of the other as person rather than exploit him or her as a means for subjective emotional or sensual gratification.13 Thus the question, “have I a responsible Will?” makes but explicit a self-other dialectic that, for Coleridge, is not merely an empirical fact but an ontological trait of personal identity. As his Opus Maximum transitions into a new chapter (on the “present general education of man in relation to the good”), Coleridge embarks on a long, densely argued passage that aims to challenge outright the quintessential modern fallacy of “plac[ing] the very principle of personal identity in the consciousness” (OM, 127–128). Coleridge opens with the familiar Kantian distinction between “the means and conditions of consciousness”—the Seelenvermögen or “reflective mechanism processes of the soul” and those external phenomena elucidated by the concrete operations of consciousness. Yet as so often, Coleridge finds prevailing vernacular usage to be the most entrenched source of philosophical misconceptions; or, as he puts it, “it is a short and downhill passage from errors in words to errors in things” (AR, 253). In this case, it is the word “form” whose careless deployment complicates the main task at hand, viz., to distinguish “the subjective necessity of apprehending an object with a form from the objective necessity of a form in the object.” His proposed remedy is to distinguish between form (“that which in all changes of manifestation . . . remains the same and cannot be thought of but as having been that which is”) and shape, understood as “the total superficies of the product of this form” (OM, 128).
Yet Coleridge’s objective here is not to revitalize some version of Plato’s or Aristotle’s forma substantialis, nor indeed to vindicate Berkeleyan idealism (which in passing he singles out for praise). Rather, in desynonymizing form and shape, Coleridge seeks to recover a crucial feature of mental life, one consistently overlooked in modern Cartesian and Newtonian thought: viz., that it is inherently active, and that passivity can only ever be ascribed to the external “shape” of phenomena, yet never to the “form” that grants the mind access to such phenomena to begin with. His fundamental commitment, which he shares with Blake, Wordsworth Goethe, and which he bequeaths John Henry Newman, John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others, is to a quasi-phenomenological conception of mind as transformative vision. For Coleridge there is no question that “an innate affinity for making contact with reality moves our thoughts” and that human sensation is inherently active, engaged, and incipiently transformative of what is phenomenally and materially given. As he puts it elsewhere, “without the potential moulds, ανευ μορφαις μορφογενεσι of the Understanding the notices supplied by the Senses would have no substans, no substance—could not be formed into Experience.”14 Just as in the case of a peach “a mechanical shaping is . . . opposed to the intrinsical and causative form that works ab intra” (OM, 128), there is an irreducibly and unceasingly active principle of form at work in the human person. “Led by our imagination,” Robert Sokolowski notes, “we tend to posit it as yet another shape, albeit a ghostly one. Even the classical names for it, forma, species, morphē, and eidos, suggest that it is like a shape. But it is an identity of another sort.” Hence, “to name a thing is to begin an adventure in manifestation, not to conclude it,” an insight that had also proven central to Coleridge’s thought at least since the Biographia.15 All of his examples thus affirm things as intrinsically active and dynamic—in contradistinction to modernity’s axiomatic view of objects as inert and heterogeneous.
Coleridge’s apt choice of example—precariously close, or so it would seem, to the merely passive and vegetative shape of external phenomena—is the infant as it interacts with its mother:
The infant follows its mother’s face as, glowing with love and beaming protection, it is raised heavenward, and with the word “GOD” it combines in feeling whatever there is of reality in the warm touch, in the supporting grasp, in the glorious countenance. The whole problem of existence is present as a sum total in the mother: the mother exists as a One and indivisible something before the outlines of her different limbs and features have been distinguished by the fixed and yet half-vacant eye; and hence, through each degree of dawning light, the whole remains antecedent to the parts, not as composed of them but as their ground and proper meaning.16
In what is an inherently conjectural passage—and undoubtedly a veiled reference to Wordsworth’s “Bless’d the infant babe” passage from The Prelude—Coleridge’s remarks here cash in on his earlier distinction between form and shape. The mother’s “different limbs and features” can only be “distinguished” by the infant’s “half-vacant eye” because they are part of a living Gestalt or form, an “antecedent” whole which, as the “ground and proper meaning” of discrete shapes, ensures that the infant’s perception is not simply a passive mirroring of dispersed parts but a bona fide act of perception. Receptivity to form and, as the case may be, a dawning, tenuous “imitation” of the mother’s movements, sounds, and expressions thus constitutes an action that lays the foundation for the infant’s consciousness of its own reality. With good reason, then, Coleridge had already desynonymized “recipiency” and “passivity” on the preceding pages: “if to imitate, and if the presence of a something imitable, are proofs of a state purely passive—if the mirror can be fairly said to imitate the form of the objects . . . we only have to admit that passiveness is the same as recipiency, and that recipiency is in no essential point different from non-recipiency, for the latter is assuredly implied in the reflection of an object” (OM, 129).
As this reductio ad absurdum shows, in so folding “recipiency” and “imitation” into sheer passivity, the modern conception of mind as strictly mechanistic and reactive fails the most elemental test of logical thinking (i.e., the law of non-contradiction), such that the idea of “recipiency” effectively collapses it into its antonym (“non-recipiency”).17 Having rather unfairly characterized the Newtonian idea of mind as “always passive—a lazy Looker–on on an external World” (CL, 2:709), Coleridge here contends that “recipiency” cannot logically be grasped as the simple imprint of material sensation on a passive receptacle. Rather, the reception of phenomena is accompanied by the consciousness of its very occurrence and, crucially, also feeds back into and positively transforms that very consciousness. Not coincidentally, Coleridge also interprets materialism and mechanism as unwitting descendants of modern Calvinism, which likewise “represents a Will absolutely passive” and, in so doing, “takes away its essence and definition.”18 In either instance, the principal error is to have neglected “the inherent distinction of things and of our notices of things” (OM, 118), a distinction that notably anticipates the concept of intentionality later developed in the phenomenology of Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl. Far from being a crude, mechanical transmission of force, all reception thus involves a distinct quality, a “sentiency” or relation that is reciprocal by nature and quietly transformative of consciousness itself. Logically, the dead-end road of Lockean empiricism or Hobbesian and Hartleyan associationism has to be countered by something on the order of modern phenomenology for which by definition all “perception is dynamic, not static.”19 For Coleridge, “the notion of objects as altogether objective begins in the same moment in which the conception is formed that is wholly subjective . . . [and] the sum of the objective as object of the sense . . . [has] the esse contained in the percipi” (OM, 135). The event of perception simply cannot be disaggregated into minute particulars, nor indeed can it be confined to the actual process of seeing those particulars. Beholding a tree, we experience a “strength . . . in the whole” for which we “seek in vain, in the boughs, the sprays, the leaves” (OM, 137). To be sure, Goethe would disagree and insist that, in point of fact, the leaf is the whole, indeed, is unintelligible except as the concrete embodiment—not just a part—of that whole. Yet in the end, Coleridge mounts a similarly Platonic argument in favor of the “form” (eidos) having ontological priority over the “shape” (hylē), and indeed proving itself to be the latter’s condition of possibility. Like Goethe, that is, he places stress on life as something intelligible only qua form (eidos) and, as it were, possessed of an integrative dimension “as unity, as plastic, and as invisible” (OM, 134). Levinas, whose work offers numerous intellectual affinities with Coleridge’s later writings, argues that “the face is a living presence” and, by its very “manifestation . . . is already discourse” (TI, 66). The Romanticist, invariably, will recall the powerful account in Book 2 of The Prelude to how Wordsworth, “a Babe, by intercourse of touch / . . . held mute dialogues with my Mother’s heart” (1850, 2:285–286; C-Stage text).
At first blush, much of the foregoing would seem to be little more than the standard Berkeleyan fare that commentators have had no difficulty identifying as the main intellectual source of Coleridge’s argument here. Yet that view is at the very least incomplete and, ultimately, misleading. First and foremost, there is the fact that the “shape” that is received by the perceiving subject is not simply received as an isolated particular but, instead, is axiomatically cross-referenced with the hypothesis of the whole of which it is a part. Considered within a phenomenological framework whose outlines Coleridge’s late writings often anticipate, “consciousness is ‘of’ something in the sense that it intends the identity of objects, not just the flow of appearances that are presented to it.”20 More than transposing discrete material externals into the realm of subjective “data” or “information,” phenomena are themselves a source of knowledge; they have agency. What allows Coleridge to draw this crucial inference is the fact that they are not exhausted by their putative referent but are by their very nature an “appearance for” someone. As such, phenomena have an actual and active presence as catalysts of inner (and likely transformative) experience. Coleridge intimates as much in his passing observation that the proverbial “mind’s eye . . . is an eye for the mind no less than [an] eye of the mind” (OM, 127; italics mine); or, as Husserl was to put it in 1905, “appearances themselves don’t appear; they are experienced” (Die Erscheinungen selbst erscheinen nicht, sie werden erlebt).21 It follows that from the first instance of perception and “recipiency” the consciousness of fluctuating phenomena or “shapes” is thereby also alerted to the substratum of its own Personëity, that antecedent and invariant form wherein, and by virtue of which, phenomena do indeed not merely “appear” but emerge as distinct and continuous focal points of awareness. Lest this insight be absorbed into some strictly interiorist account, however, it should be stressed that “experience” in Coleridge’s proto-phenomenological account of it is not to be confused with “inwardness” or some mental possession. Rather, it signifies precisely insofar as in it and by virtue of it the self discerns its ontological relatedness to a world of objects and persons.
Coleridge here builds on and extends Kant’s basic contention “that empirical knowledge results from a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity” and that, contrary to the crudely empiricist (Lockean) model, empirical data are susceptible of being apprehended only because of the mind’s intrinsic orientation to the world. Up to a point, his position also anticipates John McDowell’s recent attempts to navigate between the non-cognitivist (empiricist) “myth of the Given” wherein mind and world are ontologically distinct, and a likewise non-cognitive, “bald naturalism” that treats the “logical space of reasons” as but an epiphenomenon of “the relations . . . that constitute the logical space of nature.”22 Rejecting the prevailing view of a “dichotomy of logical spaces,” McDowell proposes a “minimal empiricism” in which “the idea of experience is the idea of something natural, without thereby removing the idea of experience from the logical space of reason.” As he insists, there simply is no warrant for “identify[ing] the dichotomy of logical spaces with a dichotomy between the natural and the normative.” In fact, as soon as we recall that for human beings “nature includes second nature,” which they acquire “by being initiated into conceptual capacities . . . whose interrelations belong in the sui generis logical space of reason,” it becomes clear that sense impressions of the Lockean variety involve eo ipso micro-judgments or acts of assent whereby raw data are constituted as “cases” (in the sense of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Fall). Critically engaging Gareth Evans’s work, McDowell zeros in on this “non-conceptual content” by insisting that “the understanding is already inextricably implicated in the deliverances of sensibility themselves” and that the “impressions” that our senses mediate for us “already have conceptual content.”23 However obliquely, McDowell’s argument for impression as something constitutively enmeshed with a mental act revives a fundamentally Platonic insight (previously reaffirmed by Coleridge) that to understand the mind-world relation at all we must begin by rethinking the very notion of “receptivity.” In particular, we must extricate ourselves from the popular assumption of a mind passively absorbing and naturalistically mirroring some contingent influx of data. For McDowell, recipiency can never be reduced to some unilateral infusion of data into a passive mind but, instead, pivots on countless acts of assent: “How one’s experience represents things to be is not under one’s control, but it is up to one whether one accepts the appearance or rejects it.”24
Circumventing both Cartesian dualism and Humean naturalism, McDowell thus insists that “the passive operation of conceptual capacities in sensibility is not intelligible independently of their active exercise in judgment.” To take that view—one that Coleridge had worked out almost manically after 1808, and which also subtends the rather more steady presentation of Newman’s 1870 Grammar of Assent—is to realize that mind, by its very essence and ontology, can only be thought of as “active.” As Newman was to put it, “our consciousness of self is prior to all questions of trust or assent.”25 Indeed, the naturalist or (more recently) neuro-scientific conception of a strictly reactive and stimulus-dependent, “passive mind” ultimately amounts to an outright contradiction of terms. For to have uptake of an appearance, however minimal, is to engage a phenomenon as appearance. It means to grasp it as a “case,” a state of affairs or Fall that by its very nature presupposes a mind having exercised a judgment and, at least potentially, being aware of its own hermeneutic role in the constitution of a specific “life-world.” Consequently, “active empirical thinking takes place under a standing obligation to reflect about the credentials of the putatively rational linkages that govern it. Regardless of whether we stand in a relationship of assent or dissent vis-à-vis a given appearance, the latter only acquires an identity within the logical space of mind in virtue of having been engaged as appearance. The mere fact that the skeptical stance (i.e., dissenting from or distrusting appearances) is more conspicuous does not license the inference that a contrasting instance of assent is a mindless non-event. Indeed, even where appearances are invested with a certain truth value, “there must be a willingness to refashion concepts and conceptions if that is what reflection recommends.”26 Not only, then, is a judgment of assent or dissent focused on intrinsically “saturated phenomena” (to borrow Jean-Luc Marion’s apt phrase) that appear for us; but any such judgment is also reflexive in that it continually tests and adjusts its own conceptual inventory.
Yet while McDowell, as Coleridge long before him, is treading in Kant’s footsteps by arguing for an integrated and collaborative (rather than disjunctive and agonistic) relationship between sensibility and spontaneity, nature and freedom—he ultimately comes down squarely on the side of a modern scientific framework committed to paring down the non-conceptual contents of sense impressions to quasi-mathematical idealities. For him, nature is ultimately “the realm of law” and modern scientific methodology the royal road toward “a new clarity about nature.”27 Putting further scrutiny on McDowell’s position is instructive here in that it throws into relief Coleridge’s ultimately very different orientation. For McDowell, what stands to be avoided at all cost is any suggestion that the logical space of reasons is radically separate from, even incommensurable with, the space of sensory contact with nature. Any suggestion “that the structure of the space of reasons is sui generis” risks making “our capacity to respond to reasons look like an occult power.” Retaining more than a passing allegiance to naturalism, even in its more stridently reductionist form, McDowell rejects any such “rampant Platonism” because it seeks to superimpose “something extra to our being the kind of animals we are.” Rather, he insists, the correct view involves an Aristotelian/Kantian model of humans having evolved rational capacities as a kind of “second nature” that remains structurally cognate with (if conceptually superior to) natural processes of any variety. What renders a traditionally Platonist view unfathomable and thus unacceptable to McDowell is that it argues both from and toward a supernatural source—that is, “the idea that our species acquired what makes it special, the capacity to resonate to meaning, in a gift from outside nature.”28 As McDowell’s oddly dogmatic rejection of understanding the world as “gift” and the human person as categorically distinct from “our species” makes clear, his commitments clearly outrun his arguments—such that his ultimate objective remains to strengthen the modern project by resolving specific tensions within its conceptual machinery, rather than questioning its basic viability and coherence.
What McDowell does not consider, then, is the possibility (central to my own account) that those contradictions and aporias that a “bald naturalism” or a strict conceptualism was unable to resolve had arisen precisely because of modernity’s peremptory rejection of ideas (e.g., of the good, person, relation, and a “responsible will”). Many of modernity’s conceptual dilemmas and ethical failures, revealed in its increasingly strident disaggregation of fact from value and of theoretical from practical reason, stem from the failure to “realiz[e] that the world is no factum brutum but gift.”29 Behind the rejection of the world as a gift and, hence, as revelation of a non-contingent rational order (a cosmos rather than universe), stands a deep-seated fear that makes us look with hesitation, even mistrust, at more mundane gifts: it is the fear of a metaphysical, all-encompassing obligation such as can only be discharged by the way we order our lives. Defining of modernity’s (anti-metaphysical) embrace of method as the exclusive foundation for knowledge is this inability to imagine or acknowledge the reality of the gift. For in its basic ethos, modern method is pledged to a wholly self-licensing and acquisitive life; it appropriates and takes possession of the world as the putative fruit and reward of our cognitive labor alone. Once it has been axiomatically posited as sheer otherness, or Gegenstand, the allegedly “brute fact” of the material world naturally proves unintelligible to modern methodical inquiry as a gift or as a phenomenon saturated with meaning. The methodical labor of post-Baconian science takes itself solely as the producer, never the recipient, of conceptually distinct meanings, and so purports to redeem an allegedly inchoate (Gnostic) hylē from being terminally trapped in the a-semantic flux of disjointed appearance.
More overtly treading in the footsteps of Coleridgean Platonism, John Macmurray’s 1953–1954 Gifford Lectures had cautioned “that because sense-perception is learned so early in life we are very apt to forget that it has to be learned at all; so that we talk of it as though the power to perceive a world of objects were born in us, and that its ‘immediacy’ is an original datum of human experience. This is not so. Perceiving by means of the senses is an acquired skill.” At first glance, Macmurray’s position would seem to be echoed by McDowell, who contends that “impressions can be cases of its perceptually appearing . . . to a subject that things are thus and so.”30 Yet to put the matter thus is to suppose—though, notably, not to have demonstrated—that our conceptual abilities are merely acquired and cultivated as a prolonged Bildung of second nature. Contrary to Macmurray’s and, long before, Coleridge’s account of the human person, McDowell reverts to an Aristotelian, naturalist view of the infant as but an organism with superior potential: “Human infants are mere animals, distinctive only in their potential, and nothing occult happens to a human being in ordinary upbringing.”31 Yet for Macmurray, as for Coleridge, the animal metaphor is never appropriate to a human person because the latter’s cultivation of innate powers is essentially bound up with its relations with another human being, and also because the structure of what Coleridge calls “recipiency” is never passive, as McDowell takes it to be. In fact, the basic phenomenological insight that the appearance of a particular shape is intrinsically appraised as phainomēnon—viz., the partial manifestation of an identity that does not itself appear as such—shows just how profoundly recipiency and imagination are enmeshed in human consciousness. For a “shape” to appear for consciousness, it must have been appraised as the appearance of an underlying form or identity: “The unity of the body is constituted, Plotinus observes, by the spatial continuity of divisible chunks of matter. In conscious awareness, however, the soul is capable of perceiving different parts of the body. It is not a part of the soul perceiving; the soul is present as a whole in its awareness of bodily parts. This presence of unity in different parts distinguishes the soul as an ontological item from bodies.”32
This dual operational structure lies at the heart of Coleridge’s famous distinction between the primary and secondary imagination—with the former constituting “the living Power and primary Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” Meanwhile, the secondary imagination disassembles and reconstitutes what active perception has thus presented; “it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create” (BL, 1:304). In its very essence, then, mind is essentially active even in its apparent “recipiency” or responsiveness vis-à-vis an “outside” empirical world, and it is also actively self-revising as regards the adequacy of its internal procedures, which are needed for organizing appearances into specific kinds of knowledge. It is, thus, both responsive to and responsible for the world that it successively composes in this manner. By contrast, mechanist or mono-causal empiricist accounts of a world supposedly obtruding in its alleged radical otherness on some supposedly self-contained and self-identical cogito appear weak on both conceptual and ethical grounds. The same is true of radically naturalist and skeptical arguments purporting to overcome the (again, supposed) antinomy of mind and world by dissolving all mental processes into mere effects or epiphenomena of inherently mindless, extrinsic causes. Anticipating modern phenomenological arguments to the same effect (in Franz Brentano, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Marion, and others), as well as McDowell’s “minimal empiricism,” Coleridge time and again emphasizes the integrative, dynamic, and participatory structure of the mind-world relation. As such, the structure of everyday perception—which is inherently a story about how perceptions are experienced—unveils within the finite individual those coexistent principles of “1. Ipsëity, 2. Alterity, 3. Community” that Coleridge elsewhere identifies as core implications of the Trinity.
Mounting a more philosophical argument against the modern Cartesian conflation of “consciousness” with “self-identity,” Coleridge puts the matter thus: “as in the patient, retrogressive investigation of organic bodily form, so in the mind nothing will appear as the first, as beginning, except only the power of communicating itself in each, relatively to an outward contemplator . . . So true is this, indeed, that in the development of the mind, the consciousness itself has the appearance of another” (OM, 127). As Levinas was to put it eventually, “the I that thinks and hearkens to itself thinking or takes fright before its depths . . . is to itself an other.”33 One can scarcely think of a writer more alert to the innate terrors of thought—occasioned not by a refractory world of things but by the mind’s intrinsic volatility—than Coleridge. Recalling some of his most sensitive lyric works written more than three decades earlier, his Opus Maximum once again ponders how both alterity and relationality are liable to register within the young child as a feeling of profound vulnerability and fragility. In a remarkable passage that presages as much modern object-relations theory and childhood psychology (Ronald Fairbairn, Melanie Klein, and D. W. Winnicott in particular) as its opening trope of writing is liable to invite deconstructionist second-guessing, Coleridge evolves the origins of the person or, as he calls it, “Personëity,” from the infant’s dawning sense that its own reality depends to an often frightening degree on the continued presence of the parent, frightening because that presence is bound to prove discontinuous:
The same spirit which beholds the parts in the whole, . . . finds a bewildering and, as it were, spectral terror, a sense of sinking, resembling that which it had suffered or dreamt of as the mother’s knee had suddenly given way from under it . . . Even as we sometimes dwell on a word that we had just written till we doubt, first, whether we had spelt it right, and at length it seems to us as if no such word could exist; and, in a kind of momentary trance, strive to make out its meaning out of the component letters, or of the lines of which they are composed, and nothing results! In such a state of mind has many a parent heard the three-years child that has awoke during the dark night in the little crib of the mother’s bed entreat in piteous tones, “Touch me, only touch me with your finger.” A child of that age, under the same circumstances, I myself heard using these very words in answer to the mother’s enquiries, half hushing and half chiding, “I am not here, touch me, Mother, that I may be here!” (OM, 131–132)
Vaguely reminiscent of the clocks and furniture melting away on Salvador Dali’s canvases, there is something decidedly surreal about Coleridge’s opening analogy as a word’s semantic identity begins to dissolve and we find ourselves unaccountably estranged from orthographic convention. As so often, we find Coleridge at his most vivid and compelling when scrutinizing moments of psychological instability. Thus, with customary phenomenological and verbal precision, he here traces the inexorable progression of some “momentary trance” spiraling into an ontological crisis or “spectral terror” in which not only our grasp of a specific object but its very existence seems in doubt. Ingeniously, Coleridge also hints how a crisis experienced by an adult puzzling over the shape, the meaning, and even the very existence of a specific word happens to recall, indeed revive the primal trauma when the infant’s reality appeared to disintegrate as a result of the mother’s withdrawal (“as the mother’s knee had suddenly given way from under it”). Rather than probing, in good Lockean manner, the reality of the outside world by touching the mother, the child begs to be touched so that it may know itself to be real. In the beginning, then, there is not an autonomous Cartesian self; nor indeed is the young child of three years some embryonic anticipation of it. Rather, there is the reciprocity and acknowledgment of one person by another in a dynamic of ipsëity, alterity, and community that is as profound as it is fragile.
Still, the psychoanalytic drama so vividly sketched remains incomplete because “there was another beside the mother, and the child beholds it and repeats, and . . . carries onward the former love to the new object. There is another, which it does not behold, but is above.” That is, the child not only seeks the concrete shape of the mother but also intuits behind it “the father and the heavenly father, the form in the shape and the form affirmed for itself . . . blended in one, and yet convey[ing] the earliest lesson of distinction and alterity.” As in Richard of St. Victor’s account of the Trinity, the reality of the person is not merely affirmed—let alone “produced”—by some kind of “intersubjective” relation. Rather, the primary, lateral relation of mother and child points back to the concurrent, vertical relation that both of them bear to “another, which [the child] does not behold,” yet whose presence it discerns in “the mother’s eye . . . turned upward” (OM, 132). The discrete elements that define the mother-child relation thus are axially ordered to the divine in the same manner as the diverse shapes of empirical perception are apprehended as parts of a single, integrative being. “Why,” Coleridge muses, “have men a Faith in God?” The only answer, he claims, is that man “has a Father and a Mother.” If, as he contends, “all begins in instinct,” there is yet something unique about “human rational instincts” in that they alone do not merely discharge themselves but are experienced as manifestations of a higher order: “Reason itself mutely prophesying of its own future advent” (OM, 122).
In phenomenological terms, the appearance of discrete shapes also points back to the non-appearance of that identity—“the form in the shape”—of which they are discrete manifestations. Were it otherwise, finite consciousness would never progress beyond disjointed sensations to the knowledge of objects, nor even to an awareness of itself as having these sensations. Yet “while we identify cubes, propositions, facts, symphonies, paintings, moral exchanges, and religious things, we also, always, are establishing our identities as the ones to whom these things are given . . . as datives of manifestation.”34 For the infant, then, the traumatic but crucially important passage involves recognizing its ipsëity as something that endures even in the absence of the parent’s tactile and expressive affirmations. Having seen that the mother, too, is bound up in relation to another—a father present yet not to be beheld—the young child takes the crucial leap; it
now learns its own alterity, and as if some sooner or later, as if some sudden crisis had taken place in its nature, it forgets henceforward to speak of itself by imitation, that is, by the name which it had caught from without. It becomes a person; it is and speaks of itself as “I,” and from that moment has acquired what, in the following stages, it may quarrel with, what it may loosen and deform, but can never eradicate—a sense of an alterity in itself, which no eye can see, neither his own nor others. (OM, 132)
In continuation of a trajectory that had originated in the mother’s “dawning presence” to the infant, self-consciousness is achieved as the child begins to understand that relations to others give a sense of fullness, but do not outright constitute, its being; and thus its “conception of life is elevated into that of Personëity” (OM, 134). If “Personëity” signifies a stage in which the individual is conscious of himself or herself as a distinct person, it does not imply “immediacy” but, on the contrary, is bound up with an ongoing and precarious ascent. Its “transcendence” thus amounts, as Levinas puts it, to a “transascendence” (TI, 35). The reality of the person endures, indeed is deepened and properly apprehended only inasmuch as her or his identity is bound up with a dialectic of estrangement and differentiation that Coleridge captures in the term “alterity” and for which infant and early childhood psychology furnish particularly compelling phylogenetic examples.
To highlight the distinctive thrust of Coleridge’s conception of the child gradually attaining a grasp of its own Personëity, we may recall some apposite, albeit rather more controlled and optimistic lines from Wordsworth’s two-part Prelude:
now a trouble came into my mind
From obscure causes. I was left alone
Seeking this visible world, nor knowing why:
The props of my affection were removed
And yet, the building stood as if sustained
By its own spirit.35
On the face of it, these early Wordsworthian lines seem to presage the later Coleridge’s consideration of the mother-child dyad as a template for his metaphysics of person and the Trinity. Yet thematic resemblances notwithstanding, the connection is problematic at best. Far more obviously—and in ways that would have left Coleridge squirming with philosophical discomfort—Wordsworth’s lines betray above all the powerful influence of Rousseau, that “apostle of affliction” (Lord Byron) for whom the insistence of the other and the specter of other-identified existence invariably signify a descent into inauthenticity and social corruption. Indeed, even as the sentimental overtones have been muted by the 1790s, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Hegel’s account of the “unhappy consciousness” or, eventually, Marx’s account of “alienation” in The German Ideology all attest to Rousseau’s enduring influence. For they all look upon alterity as a sign of loss, betrayal, and decline. Wordsworth’s assurance that his poem’s author-protagonist has at last advanced from “A naked Savage in the thunder shower” (Prelude 1799, 1:26)—himself a next-of-kin to Rousseau’s “primitive man”—to a “sensitive and creative soul” (Prelude 1805, 11:257) unequivocally “sustained / By its own spirit” and cheered on by its own voice never quite rings true.36 Wordsworth’s deeply counterfactual claim to expressive self-creation and self-possession here seems forced and rhetorically overwrought. The text cannot shake off a pervasive and deep-seated existential Angst concerning the precarious, not to say improbable, status of modern autonomy—quite simply because this is the kind of claim that will be valid only for as long as it can be performatively sustained by further instances of self-assertion and self-expression. Yet if that is the case, then the Romantic project of an “expressivist” (Charles Taylor) constitution of the self becomes virtually interchangeable with what, a century later, Freud was to analyze as the dynamic of repression and displacement. The urgent affirmations of Wordsworthian “spontaneous overflow” would appear to have morphed while being “recollected in tranquillity,” and what Wordsworth himself characterizes as a “species of reaction” shows spontaneity to be a type of defense mechanism that exposes the language of (self-)affirmation as, in fact, symptomatic. Even as the Prelude’s subtly wrought cadences simultaneously instantiate and report on the emergence of an autonomous and sensitive poetic self, they cannot but invite back in with a vengeance the world from which that self claims to have become emancipated.37 While that is a point that Romantic historicism has made with zealous attention to material detail, its full implications are more likely to disclose themselves within a philosophical analysis. Modernity’s basic premise of a punctual and autonomous self variously defined as neo-Stoic autarky (Descartes), as a hermetically sealed and mechanical will (Hobbes), or as a self-certifying bearer of rights and agent of contracts (Locke) dreads nothing more than even the most fleeting intimation that the world vis-à-vis which the self seeks to assert its independence should have inhabited the modern individual all along. The sheer suggestion that alterity might prove intrinsic to personhood, an ontological truth rather than something discretionally invited into the self’s orbit, also accounts for a growing utopian streak within modern political and economic thought. The main premise here appears to involve the procedural utopias of classical liberalism (from Smith, Ferguson, and Hume forward via Jeremy Bentham, Ricardo, to Mill and Gladstone): viz., that given enough time, bureaucratic and legal finesse and an ingenious array of economic incentives and fantasies of social mobility, our lived existence will eventually merge with the conceptual structures developed for the purpose of its transformation.
Clearly, Coleridge’s outlook is starkly opposed to this kind of project. Both in the range and historical depth of those intellectual traditions and conceptual genealogies on which he draws in later work, yet also in his defiantly Scholastic and disputatious exploration of ideas and terms—a far cry indeed from his contemporaries’ “skipping, short-winded asthmatic sentences, as easy to be understood as impossible to be remembered” (CF, 1:26)—Coleridge charts his own course. His late explorations in Trinitarian theology thus complete a reflection about the “self-insufficingness” of the person that had arisen from a critique of modern, autonomous, and self-conscious agency begun in The Friend and continued in the Biographia and the Lay Sermons. To begin with, Coleridge insists that the very fact of our being “responsible Agents; Persons, and not merely living Things . . . cannot be the object of my own direct and immediate Consciousness; but must be inferred . . . from its workings [as] it cannot be perceived in them” (AR, 78–79). The basic point in contention here had long been a staple of Coleridge’s philosophy, viz., that self-consciousness cannot logically be understood as an abstraction from or evolutionary result of some antecedent, rudimentary state. For “if this Something were a negatively simple entity, a Same throughout, there might be a Self, but no Consciousness or conscious Self-knowledge—and Knowledge without Consciousness is not a Knowing but a Being.” As he would later insist, alterity—no less than ipsëity and community—is a corollary of person.
Yet since the Critique of Pure Reason, this very fact had been a source of acute vexation; for Kant and his successors, the persistence of something outside of the self’s jurisdiction could not but derail the very notion of an autonomous subject and, ultimately, the very idea of reason (Vernunft) exclusively predicated on it. A perceptive reader and commentator of Kant’s critical philosophy, Coleridge was well aware that self-consciousness—if explained strictly as the synthesis of two “heterogeneous” constituent sources (“pure intuition” and “pure concepts,” or categories)—could never be anything more than a formal characteristic. That is, to conceive mind as a synthesis of some kind or other is to forgo any possible advance from the postulate of a merely formal unity (a.k.a. “apperception”) to an actual consciousness-of-self and the existential reality of personhood. Simply put, the Kantian subject has no soul; for, as Coleridge puts it so concisely, “we must attribute to the Soul, as a self-conscious personal Being, not only a unity that cannot be divided; but this unity must contain distinctnesses that cannot be confounded.”38 This positive and irrefragable unity, not merely in the formal sense but as a vivid center of lived experience, defines what Coleridge calls “Personëity.”
The stress on the “distinctnesses” of the “self-conscious personal Being” reveals Coleridge’s intellectual debt to nominalist theology, in particular, to Duns Scotus, whose writings he had begun to explore as early as 1801.39 Yet Coleridge also came to realize that the nominalist project had miscarried in spectacular ways and, indeed, had given rise (however inadvertently) to the materialist, necessitarian or, as he prefers to put it, “Epicurean” strand of modern thought that his own philosophical project seeks to dismantle. Above all, he rejects the tendency of Humean skepticism to disaggregate all forms and notions to such an extent as to negate the dynamic and self-determining nature of the human mind. A notebook entry from October 1809 identifies modernity’s peremptory quarantining of knowledge from significance, of fact from value, and, consequently, of knowledge qua verified information from the putative subjectivism and irrationality of belief. In particular, the notebook entry dwells on the assumption that only that can be known which is radically particular, singular, and hence incommensurable with every other entity. A bequest of fourteenth-century nominalism, this tendency toward a strictly disjunctive understanding of knowledge constitutes a development whose myriad implications Coleridge continued to ruminate over the coming decades with acute dismay:
It is not that the Philosophy of the Fathers or moderate Realists is more abstruse or difficult to be believed than that of the Nominalists & Materialists (who are indeed the true Realists) so far from it that the philosophy of Plato & his systematic followers is only a display of the possibility of that which Mankind in general believe to be real—such as, that there is some ground in Nature or a common essence why Peter & John are two men/whereas the Philosophy of the Nominalists is abhorrent from all the common feelings of all mankind—but this it is, that gives the latter its fashion & favor—that . . . it consists in unbelieving as far as possible—till we come to words that convey all their separate meanings at once, no matter how incomprehensible or absurd the collective meaning may be—for the collective meaning cannot be inquired after but by an effort of Thought—and to avoid this is the aim of those who embrace this philosophy. (CN, §3628)
Most troubling for Coleridge is how modernity’s model of institutionalized and methodically accumulative knowledge has effectively abandoned the ancient idea of a fortuitous convergence of theoria and eudaemonia in a single and absorbing contemplative act.40 An 1822 fragment on William of Ockham, while complimentary of the latter’s contribution, thus shifts attention to the deleterious aftermath of his project: “the Dialectic was soon left behind; and the Logic swam with the tide; and like the pigs cut its <own> Throat as it advanced—and soon sunk & gave way to the three other Factors, the Sense, <the Sensation,> and the Senses <as the union of both>.” As a result, the nominalists’ “empassioned Business of detecting Error and protesting against the old Usurpaters, Aristotle and the Papacy” soon gave way to “a heartless Scepticism” (SW & F, 2:1002). Coleridge’s own conception of human agency, and of the will as its unconditional ground, thus unfolds in the most scrupulous opposition to both the Thomistic and the nominalist positions. As regards the latter, Coleridge specifically repudiates Hobbes’s voluntarist model of human agents forever “compelled” by seemingly extraneous motives and desires and incapable of transcending the scope and intensity of these factors in either thought or action.41
Often at his best when subjecting another writer’s position to rigorous logical critique, the late Coleridge of the Opus Maximum thus points out how Hobbes’s reduction of the self to an embodied will, taken on its own terms, effectively denies the reality of mind itself inasmuch as it collapses thinking into mere computation. To adopt such a perspective on the life of the mind imperils the reality of the individual person in whom that life is said to unfold. It also dissolves the ethical and imaginative dimensions of all thinking—which (if the term means anything) can never be merely calculative but is both generative of new meaning and reflexively aware of that very fact; thinking, in other words, is never merely concerned with the determination of means but with the counterfactual imagination of as yet unrealized possibilities, which in turn can only acquire significance when evaluated within a framework of meaningful and compelling ends. The following, long passage from the Opus Maximum thus targets the meliorist psychology of self-interest that the Scottish political economists had advanced, seemingly in opposition to Hobbes though in effect replicating his opaque and inarticulate voluntarism. As in Aids to Reflection, the cardinal issue to which Coleridge returns time and again is the categorical inadmissibility of material, non-spiritual factors as supposed causal determinants of human thought. To impute some a priori determinacy to our mental life—be it in the form of external constraints or internal compulsions—inexorably leads one to deny the reality of mind itself. It is a consequence that those targeted by Coleridge’s critique clearly do not intend and that ultimately vitiates their own political and moral objectives. Against the post-Hobbesian “scheme which considers virtue as a species of prudence” or self-interest, Coleridge maintains that
what [the necessitarian] cannot derive from motives of Self-interest he will attribute to impulses of selfishness. Now this argument supposes the plenary causative or determining power in these motives or impulses, so that both the one and the other do not at all differ from physical impact as far as the relation of cause and effect is concerned. For if it were otherwise, we should still have to ask what determined the mind to permit this determining power to these motives and impulses. Or why did the mind or Will sink from its proper superiority to the physical laws of cause and effect, and place itself in the same class with the bullet or the billiard-ball? It would be most easy to trace this whole mechanical doctrine of causative impulses and determining motives to a mere impersonation of general terms. For what is a Motive? Not a thing, but the thought of a thing. But as all thoughts are not motives . . . a motive must be defined as a determining thought. But again, what is a Thought? Is this a thing or an individual? What are its circumscriptions, what the interspaces between it and another? Where does it begin? Where does it end? . . . A motive is neither more nor less than the act of an intelligent being determining itself, and the very watchword of the necessitarian is found to be, in fact, at once an assertion and a definition of frequency, i.e. the power of an intelligent being to determine its own agency. But even this is for us superfluous; it is enough that he who upholds this scheme of universal selfishness or self-interest, not from any corruption but from the original necessity of our nature, implies the denial of a responsible Will.42
In his own language, Coleridge here construes the will as an intellectual act in terms familiar from Aquinas’s Summa. Thinking and willing are at all times distinguished by the way in which they show the mind or person to be at some remove from itself. Human thought is not “locked into” a particular computational matrix; it does not simply “apply” itself to data of supposedly external and immutable character. Rather, it is dynamic and fundamentally “open” toward any variety of possible meanings and valuations. The entire necessitarian language of Newtonian physics, in particular, the causal model of an instantaneous and inexorable transmission of force from A to B, proves in Coleridge’s view categorically inapplicable to the mental life of persons.43 Not only does it lead to an infinite regress (“we should still have to ask what determined the mind to permit this determining power to these motives and impulses”), but it peremptorily denies any awareness-of-self to a mind so conceived and, thus, in effect negates what it purports to explain. For by its very nature, mechanical (or efficient) causality merely occurs but cannot know of itself. As Coleridge puts it, “Knowledge without Consciousness is not a Knowing but a Being” (SW & F, 1:427). In sharp contrast with Hobbes’s reification of motives as “causes” and, ultimately, mere things, Coleridge insists on their ideational status. Motives are not the other of thinking but a particularly elemental form of it, viz., “a determining thought.” By its very nature, then, all thinking amounts to a dynamic and complex sequence of focused imaginings, a “playing out” of various possible realities. As Maurice Blondel was to observe, a “motive is in effect only the repercussion and the synthesis of a thousand mute activities; that is the reason for its natural efficacy. The motive does not appear suddenly, up in the air, so to speak, and as if by spontaneous generation; it is the deputy of a crowd of elementary tendencies that back it and push it . . . Its efficacious charm therefore comes from its expressing and representing precisely that which it moves.”44 Put differently, thinking is prima facie never reactive to motives but positively transformative of its (virtual) “object.” Far from merely computing what is factually given, it is counterfactual to its very core. As Coleridge also implies, its form is inherently temporal and incipiently narrative (“Where does it begin? Where does it end?”) and, thus, stands in sharp contrast to the instantaneity of cause-effect relations in the realm of physics.
With somewhat different emphasis, Coleridge had already formulated his critique of determinism and its “dehumanizing” implications as early as 1803. Here, too, stress is placed on “the individuality of Man”—not “merely man, as every Tyger is simply Tyger”—but as an incommunicable being, a person “more than numerically distinguishable . . . this man, with these faculties, these tendencies,” and so on. Yet in what might seem an uncharacteristic concession, Coleridge also notes that how
each individual turns out (Homo Phainomenon) depends, as it seems, on the narrow Circumstances & Inclosure of his Infancy, Childhood, & Youth—& afterwards on the larger Hedge-girdle of the State, in which he is a Citizen born— & . . . the Zone, Climate, Soil, Character of Country and innumerable other factors besides. It thus would appear that the individual is indeed influenced & determined (caused to be what he is, qualis sit = qualified, bethinged) by it Universal Nature, its elements & relations.
Characteristic of Coleridge’s argument is its dialectical, quasi-Scholastic mode of establishing a point by affording the opposing view the strongest possible hearing so as to show that the conclusions to which it gives rise are not the ones ordinarily drawn. The latter, of course, here would be some version of determinism—viz., that the factors shaping the nature of the person constitute an “apparent horizon, & uninsurmountable,” an absolute boundary impossible for the self to transcend. The condition not only frames the human being but, it would seem, drains it of all perspective and of any potential for further development. To quote Coleridge’s rather Blakean image, a tough “knot Skein of necessities . . . interwine[s] the slenderest fibres of his Being” and “binds the whole frame with chains of adamant.”45
Paradoxically, though, it is the very construction of this scenario as an argument fashioned by various proponents that shows it to fail on its own terms. That is, rather than articulating a differentiated ontology, the modern materialist and determinist account of life as a seamless continuum of psycho-physiological processes invariably gravitates toward a monistic form of explanation. It construes the myriad manifestations of life—including highly complex instances of human self-consciousness (e.g., anxiety, guilt, desire, hope, despair, love) as discrete and discontinuous “states.” Initially, it does so simply by referring these “states” back to specific, quantifiable constellations or spikes taken to stand out from amidst a hypostatized, steady-state chemical and neuro-electric equilibrium. In due course, however, the specific factum probandum of a particular state of mind is effectively being dissolved into the factum probans—say, some measurable chemical “imbalance” or such. This procedure appears incoherent and flawed in several ways. First, as regards method, it is illogical to purport having explained something if the explanation tendered consists in denying the phenomenon that had prompted it any reality by discrediting it as a chemically and neurologically occasioned illusion. Second, still at the level of method, a materialist and deterministic “explanation” of human (self-) consciousness is flawed in that it takes for its point of departure some concrete expression of how the specific psychological state is being experienced (e.g., “I am feeling profoundly guilty, anxious, or—worse yet—conflicted”). Extending Hegel’s theory of recognition and Freud’s notion of transference, Jacques Lacan in his Rome discourse on Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (1953) had made a compelling case for how by its very essence human expression and speech unveils “the transindividual reality of the subject.” For all speech and symbolic action—simply in virtue of being action—attests to a desire for recognition: “the first object of desire is to be recognized by the other.” Operations of reference, constative utterances, and the entire, often trivial chatter (Heidegger’s Gerede) that circumscribes our lived, social existence would be both pointless and unfathomable in the absence of that other. As Lacan puts it, “there is no Word without a reply,” and that reply (whether real or merely projected) allows us to understand “the unconscious [as] the discourse of the other.” The Freudian symptom thus is not to be construed as some extrinsic material concatenation but, instead, proves isomorphous with the structure of human speech: “the symptom resolves itself entirely in a Language analysis, because the symptom is structured like a Language.” Inasmuch as “man speaks . . . because the symbol has made him man,” consciousness cannot be framed as the unwitting effect of independently operating, efficient causes except insofar as these have been incorporated into the orbit of its hermeneutic and symbolic practice.46 Invariably, that is, acts of self-description or self-disclosure not only furnish the initial prompt for any account of mind. By dint of their uniquely structured forms of self-representation, they also condition any attempt at isolating the material causes hypothesized to have occasioned the phenomenon under investigation. Reductionism’s basic fallacy here is what the ancients called metabasis allo genos—an impermissible leaping from one level of reasoning into an entirely different one. For its account of mind misconstrues as neutral, strictly factual, and quantitative “evidence” those aspects and cues furnished only by the subject’s richly layered and symptomatic expressive acts. Neutral “facts” and material “evidence” in the analysis of human consciousness are but a willful and one-sided extrapolation of “causes” from human symbolic practice, a realm wherein fact and value are inextricably entwined.
To “understand” someone’s claim that she or he feels overwhelmingly anxious, or has religious visions, or fears of persecution or, perhaps, all three at once, is to enter a hermeneutic circle wherein claims of distinctive conscious states are intelligible only if situated within various, often overlapping narrative frames such as correlate with a person’s accumulated experiences, habits, goals, fears, desires, etc. One might, for example, wonder whether a claim at emotional distress is expressively shaped with a view to its intended audience, perhaps reflecting the speaker’s deep-seated insecurity, now discharged as an unwitting or unconfessed desire to be selected, say, for some neuro-scientific study. In any event, the meaning of a reported experience, as well as the distinctive expressive quality that the report itself takes, is saturated by the given individual’s history of socialization, education, and a vast array of experiences (both conscious and oblique) that may contingently factor into the particular expressive act now being scrutinized for its somatic underpinnings. For his part, Coleridge proves keenly aware of the methodological and hermeneutic blindness of the “corpuscular philosophy.” Indeed, his critique seems rather prescient of the serious conceptual tensions (not always honored in open debate) between variously hermeneutic, phenomenological, and neuro-scientific accounts of human consciousness. As he sees it, any deterministic conception of human life and agency (its own claims notwithstanding) must itself be appraised as a specific hypothesis, a value-driven and value-fraught hermeneutic act for which it is impossible to claim purely factual neutrality. Hence, the very project of a materialist and determinist explanation of the human simply cannot claim to have originated ex nihilo and to be free of all hermeneutic “fore-meanings” (Hans-Georg Gadamer). And yet, from Francis Bacon’s and Robert Boyle’s anti-teleological framing of a natural science to Edmund Husserl’s notion of “bracketing,” or epochē, modernity habitually authorizes itself by some such trope and the extended rhetorical figure of a radical historical caesura, a break with the idea of tradition and, hence, by what it takes to be its decisive emancipation from and overcoming of all historical and hermeneutic contingency.
Offering an early and uniquely incisive critique of these key axioms of modernity, Coleridge certainly understands that to recover a model of rational personhood within the modern era means resisting constructions of the self as a merely contingent realization of material traits underlying the species “human being” at large. To confuse the value-saturated incommunicability of person with the generic and abstract species-concept of human being contingently realized as so many “individuals” (Schopenhauer dismissively speaks of man as “nature’s mass-produced commodity” [der Mensch, diese Fabrikware der Natur]) is to have lost one’s bearings as a rational and responsible agent.47 For in failing to grasp this foundational distinction between persons and things, one will implicitly have endorsed the view of the fact/value opposition as something ontologically given rather than a claim contingently advanced at a particular moment in history. Against modernity’s self-certifying narrative, which celebrates the transformation of knowledge from an interpretive and morally responsible hermeneutic into an open-ended quest for (ostensibly value-neutral) information, Coleridge insists that the modern project is itself fueled by a deep-seated narrative motivation to transform and control the ways in which its historical conditions of emergence will henceforth be appraised. If one were to acknowledge the modern scientific project, not as a monist truth but as a hermeneutically conditioned thesis and evolving argument—however rigorous and lucid its methodology and practices—any reductionist account of human agency would have to meet two distinct kinds of intellectual and conceptual responsibility. First, it would have to demonstrate the internal coherence and consistency of its premises, procedures, and claims. Yet while these procedural issues have of course been understood as the bread and butter of modern science since Bacon and his contemporaries, another kind of accountability continues to be not so much met as it is peremptorily rejected. For a scientific explanation of human agency to succeed, it will also have to account for (not explain away) the fact that to experience a particular quality of consciousness—even a sensation or feeling as rudimentary as “hunger” (to recall Robert Spaemann’s example)—is not the same as to register a value-neutral shift in one’s psycho-physiological constitution. For even as hunger in most instances is bound to involve some measurable drop in blood-sugar levels, followed by appropriate neural signals traveling to the relevant circuitry of the brain, the sensation of it is also, and just as immediately, identified as one that I am now having; and in so disclosing itself as my experience, the sensation is inevitably absorbed into a web of cross-references and nested within continuously unfolding narratives that define me as a person.
Put differently, a specific sensation or thought never takes place as a punctum—isolated in space and time from all contiguous matter. Rather, for it to be recognized as my hunger means that the sensation of it becomes instantaneously enmeshed with a host of value-representations. If I suffer from an eating disorder, it may trigger feelings of guilt, shame, or even a suspicion that the sensation itself may not be fully trustworthy. Then again, if it happens to be Lent, I may conceivably welcome the feeling of hunger as an opportunity for deepening my religious commitments and spiritual achievement; or hunger may prove acutely unwelcome because I reflexively observe how its nagging presence disrupts my concentration on the sentence I am just now writing; or again it may be something I proceed to scrutinize as I evaluate whether to satisfy it with a quick but uninspired meal at the faculty commons or much better fare at a restaurant that I can only frequent by missing a likely unpleasant scheduled meeting with a student who has been pestering me with emails about a poor grade. Simply put, all conscious states are subject to some form of appraisal, be it reflexive and explicit or more tentative and, perhaps, even subliminal. What the materialist and reductionist account fails to grasp is the categorical divide between the material “event” of consciousness and its infinitely complex, layered, and richly evaluative internalization; Coleridge elsewhere calls it “the natural differences of things and thoughts” (BL, 1:90).
As the notebook entry resumes, Coleridge thus draws attention to the myriad ways in which ostensibly neutral and seemingly implacable constraints on conscious human existence will imperceptibly transform into concerns for that very consciousness. Any fact is a fact for someone and, consequently, is the bearer of value:
And yet again, the more steadily he contemplates this fact, the more deeply he meditates on these workings, the more clearly it dawns upon him that this conspiration of influences is no mere outward or contingent Thing, that rather this necessity is himself, that that without which or divided from which his Being can not be even thought, must therefore in all its directions and labyrinthine folds belong to his Being, and enter into evolve out of his essences. Abstract from these—and what remains? A general term, after all the notices conceptions, notices, and experiences represented by it, had been removed—an Ens logicum which instead of a thought <or Conception> represents only the act and process of Thinking, or rather the form & condition, under which it is possible to think and conceive at all.48
In phenomenological terms, that external “Skein of necessities” is itself an intentional object, less a constraint or “insurmountable” horizon than a “stimulus” for the human intellect to reason upon. Indeed, were it not for those resistances, constraints, and abrasions that a determinist mistakes for absolute and non-transcendable conditions of human life, it is hard to fathom just what it might be that the self qua person could even reflect on. Already in the Biographia, Coleridge had warned against “the mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes and essence” (BL, 1:123). As it turns out, “condition” is itself a descriptive, interpretive, and ultimately evaluative concept rather than some extrinsic, value-neutral cause. In an argument that curiously foreshadows Nietzsche’s critique of objective, “scientific” explanation in On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense (1872), Coleridge shrewdly dismantles the deterministic project by showing human beings to have at all times a unique appraisal of their existence. What Heidegger was to call “being-in-the-world” (in der Welt sein) points to precisely this ontology of understanding (Verstehen) anterior to any particular factual and material constellation that might emerge as its object. Coleridge’s notebook entry continues: “The more he reflects, the more he finds it, that the stimulability determines the existence & character of the Stimulus, the Organ the object” (CN, no. 4109, f129v). Any totalizing, deterministic conception of human life winds up draining of all meaning that which it purports to explain. Accounts of this type (from Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’homme machine to contemporary cognitivism) logically fail as explanations precisely because in seeking to dissolve human agency into a web of causal determinants they end up denying the very reality of what they claim to elucidate. Such a stance may amount to a hypothesis but surely does not constitute any proof of it. In exposing determinism’s habit of dissolving a priori the very reality of the object of which, paradoxically, it purports to offer an explanation, Coleridge thus exclaims: “What then remains! O the noblest of all—to know that so it is, and in the warm & genial Light of this knowledge to beget each in himself a new man, which comprehends the whole in of which this phænomenal Individual is but a component point, himself comprehended only in God—alone.”49 One cannot but admire the dialectical brilliance and verbal precision with which Coleridge here teases out conclusions at once necessary and yet diametrically opposed to those that the deterministic picture of human agency has usually been taken to license or, indeed, compel.
Coleridge’s intimation—later expanded in his scrupulous reflections on the nature of the will—that “Man [makes] the Motive” holds at least two major implications for a fuller understanding of personhood.50 First, even the most totalizing deterministic account, simply because it is an account—that is, an interpretive or hermeneutic stance vis-à-vis the world—necessarily premises the reality of the person as a self-conscious being, rather than the merely reactive, sentient, or instinctual “living Thing” to which such accounts seek to reduce it. Second, the very etiology of person, if understood (per Richard’s definition) as “a rational existence of incommunicable nature” (rationalis naturae incommunicabilis existentia [De Trinitate, 4.23]), shows it to be constitutively aware of its relational character, its ontological embeddedness in a community of persons and, thus, having “world” rather than merely being embedded in a specific kind of “environment.” Even in the most hardened reductionist portrayals of human agency as some foreign-determined and self-enclosed biomass (tenaciously clinging to chimeras such as intellectual autonomy, imagination, choice, and responsibility), the gloomy scenario in question only signifies inasmuch as it is elaborated for another. Being constitutively interpretive of the world, of others, and of its own incommunicable self, person is ontologically constituted as a “being who must form attitudes [das stellungnehmende Wesen].”51 As Hegel (who along with Nietzsche strongly influenced Arnold Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology) would furthermore insist, the “attitudes” or “perspectives” that arise from the human being’s hermeneutic constitution belong themselves to the features of its world that solicit further “attitudes” (Einstellungen) and responses from others. Our interpretations are eo ipso oriented toward another or, as Coleridge will put it, they presuppose “an equation in which ‘I’ is taken as equal to but yet not the same as ‘Thou’” (OM, 75). The nature of the human mind as it constructs perspectives on its world thus proves inseparable from its relation to other persons for whom it seeks to articulate its interpretations. Yet to do so, the person must unconditionally acknowledge the reality, equality, and dignity of that other. Put differently, the “thesis” of a self-conscious I amounts to “an equation of Thou with I by means of a free act [of the Will] <by> which <we> negate [sic] the sameness in order to establish the equality” (OM, 75–76). In working out his post-idealist model of human agency—one in which personality is constitutively (rather than electively) relational—Coleridge may be drawing on F. H. Jacobi. As early as 1785, Jacobi had taken the overtly anti-Cartesian view that “without the Thou, the I is impossible” and “that the I and the Thou . . . must be present at once in the soul even in the most primordial and simple of perceptions—the two in one flash, in the same indivisible instant.” In one of his most incisive works, a critique of David Hume on Faith (1787), Jacobi had gone so far as to make the “distinctness” and clarity of the self’s representations contingent on a Thou: “the ‘I’ becomes more distinct in equal measure as the ‘Thou’ does. There arise concept, word, person [In demselben Maaße wie das Du deutlicher wird, wird auch das Ich deutlicher. Es entsteht Begriff, Wort, Person].”52 With good reason, then, Coleridge’s strikingly modern conception of the I-Thou relation functions as a template for the intrapersonal dynamic of “conscience” that dominates much of his late writings. For only by illuminating the ethical, relational, and intellectual structure of “conscience” can that term be salvaged from the self-cherishing and self-licensing notion of religious enthusiasm and hyper-Augustinian evangelicalism clearly on the ascendant in the 1820s; and, more crucially yet, only if the structure of conscience has been properly articulated will Coleridge’s ontological characterization of person as a “responsible Will” have been completed.
1. f10; Coleridge’s decision to strike out the masculine pronoun, substituting the neuter, reflects his preoccupation in the preceding notebook entry with finding a way to think about “Love as it exists in common both in the Man & in the Woman.” To do so, the appropriate term is “Person, instead of ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’—& yet our Language will not permit <us> to say, It—/nor the Greek, or Latin, ό or quod as the pron. Rel. to Ἀνθρωπος or Homo—and the same inconvenience is felt when I mean both sexes” (CN, no. 4729); for Coleridge’s egalitarian views on women in society, see Inquiring Spirit, 303–311.
2. “Desire is the form in which self-consciousness appears at the first stage of its development . . . and [desire] here has as yet no further determination than that of a drive” (. . . ist die Begierde diejenige Form, in welcher das Selbstbewuβtsein auf der ersten Stufe seiner Entwicklung erscheint . . . [und] hat hier . . . noch keine weitere Bestimmung als die des Triebes). Hegel, Enzyklopädie, 3:215 (§426; trans. mine).
3. Ich und Du, 22; trans. mine.
4. Rolnick, Person, Grace, and God, 47.
5. “Thus, under the term ‘existence’ we may subsume two distinct considerations, namely that which pertains to the mode of existence [ad rationem essentie], and another which concerns to the mode of origination [ad rationem obtinentie]” (De Trinitate, 4.13); see also Rolnick, Person, Grace, and God, 53–55.
6. The term incommunicabilis figures prominently in St. Thomas’s account of personhood in the Summa Theologia, which follows Boethius in understanding “person” not as a predicate (nomen intentionis) but as signifying a “reality” (nomen rei); see ST, Ia, 29, 3; yet Aquinas follows Richard in adopting the concept of “existence” for his own magisterial definition.
7. Coleridge refers to Richard in his Marginalia on Lessing, noting that “I far prefer Ricardus di St Victore and the mystical Theologians” to the rationalism of John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon (CM, 3:682); Coleridge responds more critically to a synopsis of Richard’s arguments in Tennemann’s Geschichte der Philosophie, 10 vols. (1798–1817); see CM, 5:783–784, 795.
8. Cousins, “Theology of Interpersonal Relations,” 56.
9. Ibid., 58.
10. Coleridge, Poetical Works, 2:994–995; first printed in On the Constitution of Church & State (CCS, 184–185), the poem is prefaced by an epigraph taken from the opening canto of Dante’s Paradiso (I, 88–90), lines that Coleridge also reproduces in CN, no. 4786.
11. For a detailed reading of Coleridge’s invocation of Romans 7:24, and on this passage in the notebooks, see Webster, Body and Soul, 71–96.
12. Quoted in Murdoch, Sovereignty, 46.
13. A justly famous instance would be Augustine’s realization, upon the death of his unnamed “friend” in Confessions, 4.4.7–4.9.14, that his conception of friendship—as well as the overwrought and unfocused grief following that loss—had been deeply narcissistic all along. Having lost “the source of gladness” (amiseram gaudium meum), Augustine immediately questions the spiritual significance of his own tears: “Or is weeping too a bitter thing, whose pleasure lies in the loathing for things we enjoyed previously, and now abhor?” (an et fletus res amara est, et prae fastidio rerum, quibus prius fruebamur, et tunc, dum ab eis abhorremus, delectat?). Confessions, 4.5.10; see Wetzel’s excellent discussion of this episode in “Book Four.”
14. CN, no. 4679; as he writes in a letter of 1801, “any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system” (CL, 2:709).
15. Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person, 110, 112. The juxtaposition between the dynamic and the inert model of things and objects, respectively, had also occupied the late Husserl’s discussion of modern dualism in Crisis, esp. 60–100.
16. OM, 131; on this extended passage, see also A. Taylor, Coleridge’s Defense, 80–85. For a strikingly similar discussion of the child “assent[ing] to his mother’s veracity, without perhaps being conscious of his own act,” see Newman’s Grammar of Assent; an instance of what Newman means by “real assent” (in contradistinction to conditional, “notional assent”), the child’s recognition of the mother’s reality “has a force and life in it which the other assents have not, insomuch as he apprehends the proposition, which is the subject of it, with greater keenness and energy than belongs to his apprehension of the others. Her veracity and authority is to him no abstract truth or item of general knowledge, but is bound up with that image and love of her person which is part of himself, and makes a direct claim on him for his summary assent to her general teachings” (Grammar of Assent, 34–35).
17. Earlier in his Opus Maximum, Coleridge juxtaposes the subject’s receptivity to sense “impressions” with the presentations of “conscience” and notes how “in the facts of conscience we are not only agents[,] but . . . know ourselves to be such! Nay! We are aware that our very passiveness herein is an act of passiveness” (OM, 71); as the most conspicuous instance of self-awareness that Coleridge had found adumbrated in the scriptural term parakupsas, conscience effectively negates the very notion of mind ever being, or having been, completely passive.
18. AR, 158–159; elsewhere, Coleridge notes that by the will of God the Calvinists, “the Literalizers of half a dozen metaphors . . . mean nothing better than the capricious enslaved Wantonnesses of human Choice—determinations pre-determined by the appetites or at best by the ignorance of the Agents and the narrow limits of their Agency” (CN, no. 5270).
19. Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, 18; regarding Coleridge’s rather unconventional assimilation of Hobbes to associationist psychology, see BL, 1:95–97 and, for his refutation of associationism as a whole, BL, 1:106–115.
20. Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, 20.
21. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:350; see also Cutsinger, Form of Transformed Vision, esp. 46–72.
22. McDowell, Mind and World, 9, xviii, xv.
23. Ibid., 46.
24. Ibid., 11.
25. Grammar of Assent, 67; for McDowell, “the relevant conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity” such that we understand “what Kant calls ‘intuition’—experiential intake—not as a bare getting of an extra-conceptual Given, but as a kind of occurrence or state that already has conceptual content” (Mind and World, 9); surprisingly, in moving beyond Sellars’s rejection of the “myth of the Given” and toward arguing “that the conceptual contents that are most basic in this sense are already possessed by impressions themselves” (10), McDowell seems to reinhabit (but not acknowledge) a modern phenomenological conception of mind-world relations that has recently been given powerful articulation in the work of Jean-Luc Marion; see Being Given, esp. 7–70. For other arguments to the same effect—viz., that “perception is an active and synthesizing operation” and that “attention is in no sense a response to stimulus”—see Hedley (Living Forms, 48), who also invokes Collingwood’s Principles of Art and, above all, Coleridge’s distinction between the primary and secondary imagination in the Biographia (1:304f.).
26. McDowell, Mind and World, 12–13.
27. Ibid., 78.
28. Ibid., 83–84, 123. “We need to recapture the Aristotelian idea that a normal mature human being is a rational animal, but without losing the Kantian idea that rationality operates freely in its own sphere” (85); later McDowell refers to his project as a “naturalized version of platonism” (110).
29. Hedley, Living Forms, 69; Hedley’s engagement of McDowell’s work here, though also critical, ultimately reaches somewhat different conclusions from my own.
30. Macmurray, Persons in Relation, 53. McDowell, Mind and World, xviii, xii, xix–xx.
31. McDowell, Mind and World, 123.
32. Hedley, Living Forms, 88; drawing on phenomenological rather than Platonist language, Sokolowski makes the same crucial point; see Introduction to Phenomenology, 17–41; for a fuller discussion of the reciprocity between the form of the phenomenon as a catalyst for the cultivation of human intelligence in the context of Romantic science and aesthetics, see Pfau, “All is Leaf.”
33. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 36.
34. Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, 32; see also Sokolowski’s Phenomenology of the Human Person, 108–116. As he notes there, “the shape of the thing is . . . not the substance of the thing. As a property it points to something more elementary than itself; it points to the thing in its kind, in its essence or nature. To be able to distinguish the shape of the thing from the thing, to see the shape as a property, is an enormous intellectual accomplishment. We could even say that it is the birth of intelligence” (109).
35. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798–1799, Part 2, lines 321–326; on Wordsworth’s transposition of affect into text into a (ostensibly coherent and continuous) self, see my Wordsworth’s Profession, 302–320.
36. Wordsworth’s Rousseauvian image is almost certainly informed by the sensational discovery, in 1797, of the so-called “Wild Boy of Aveyron,” a feral child temporarily captured in France, near Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance, and speculated to have lived outside of civilization at least since his fifth year. Following E. M. Itard’s book on the case (An Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man . . . , 1802), Coleridge’s notebook entry of early 1803 remarks on “a man who hypochond. fancied himself to have been a lonely Savage; and poisoned by civilization / —savage of Aveyron” (CN, no. 1348); see also A. Taylor, Coleridge’s Defense, 35–36.
37. On the aesthetic design of the Prelude’s narrative form, its underlying epistemology of the self, and the widely observed “displacement” of the historical, economic, and political forces that conspire in the development of aesthetic autonomy, see Liu, Wordsworth, 359–452; de Man, “Autobiography as de-Facement,” 67–82; for a critique of Romantic historicism’s axiomatically suspicious hermeneutics, see Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession, 114–139, and “Reading beyond Redemption.”
38. SW & F, 1:427–428; in a letter to Thomas Clarkson (13 October 1806), Coleridge distinguishes levels of consciousness, depending on the degree to which each is aware of, or indeed capable of reflecting on, its own continuity (CL, 2:1196–1197). In his “Prolegomena” to Opus Maximum, Thomas McFarland notes how “soul seemed, under the progressive arguments of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalism, more and more a metaphorical conception, or at least one that could not be used in cognitive argument,” and he also remarks on Descartes’s and Locke’s analytical fragmentation of “person” as merely a question of “personal identity” (OM, cxv); on the “Soul” in Coleridge’s thinking, see also Engell, “Coleridge and His Mariner on the Soul.” In a notebook entry of 1820, Coleridge jots down a memorandum to himself, viz., “to give a more plain as well as a more satisfactory Demonstration than I have hitherto met with . . . that all Consciousness is necessarily conditioned by Self-Consciousness” (CN, no. 4717).
39. On Coleridge’s reading of Scotus, see his letter to Josiah Wedgewood, 18 February 1801 (CL, 2:678–685), which still professes to be unfamiliar with Scotus’s works. By July, Coleridge is reading Duns Scotus with a clear, indeed exuberant sense of purpose: “I mean to set the poor old Gemman on his feet again, & in order to wake him out of his present Lethargy, I am burning Locke, Hume, & Hobbes under his Nose—they stink worse than Feather or Assafetida” (CL, 2:746).
40. Speaking of this “most momentous . . . reversal of the hierarchical order between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa,” Hannah Arendt elaborates: “the point was not that truth and knowledge were no longer important, but that they could be won only by ‘action’ and not by contemplation . . . The reasons for trusting doing and for distrusting contemplation or observation became more cogent after the results of the first active inquiries.” One must not misconstrue this reversal—achieved above all with the help of instruments and, especially, the paradigm of “mathematical knowledge, where we deal only with self-made entities of the mind”—as simply “raising doing to the rank of contemplation as the highest state of which human beings are capable.” For as the “handmaiden of doing” (HC, 289–291) all active thinking and its implicit vision of discrete knowledges moving toward a mathesis universalis effectively eclipsed the value of contemplation altogether.
41. Hedley observes that, “for all his emphasis upon the ‘will,’ Coleridge is not a voluntarist. He does not affirm the will over against reason” (Coleridge, 10); on Coleridge’s opposition to the established symbiosis of voluntarism and natural theology (in Boyle, Newton, Paley et al.), see Brice, Coleridge and Scepticism, 10–51.
42. OM, 25–26; the critique here offered echoes his earlier, 1816 essay on “Consciousness and Self-Consciousness,” where Coleridge had pointed out how “the phrase ‘motive’ is has likewise been much abused by the philosophical Necessitarians, as if a motive were a Thing, that by impact communicated motion, instead of being a mere generic Term. For what is a motive, but a determining Thought? And what is a Thought but the mind thinking in this or that direction? And what is thinking but the mind acting on itself? A motive therefore = the mind in the act of self-determination” (SW & F, 1:399). For an introduction to Coleridge’s conception of self-consciousness, see also A. Taylor, Coleridge’s Defense, 61–86.
43. It is telling that Coleridge here rejects as inapplicable the common analogy of the billiard ball just as emphatically as Schopenhauer insists on its relevance to the mental life. In his 1839 Prize Essay Schopenhauer thus remarks how “a human being can no more get up from his chair before a motive pulls or pushes him than a billiard ball can be set in motion before it is struck; but then his getting up is as necessary and inevitable as is the rolling of the ball after it is struck” (39); McFarland is right to suggest that “the absolute antithesis of Coleridge and Schopenhauer subtends an urgent similarity . . . throughout the entire philosophical spectrum of their thought” (OM, clxxxv).
44. Blondel, Action, 111–112.
45. CN, no. 4109, f128v; the entry is listed under 1811 but, in the notes, dated for “a period after 1803.” Elsewhere, in a critique of Edward Williams’s A Defence of Modern Calvinism (1812) and Essay on the Equity of Divine Government (1809), Coleridge again uses the image of a supposedly “adamantine” chain of logic that fails, not by breaking but by having been attached to the wrong principle; as he argues, Williams lacks “the noble honesty, that majesty of openness, so delightful in Spinoza, which made him scorn all attempts to varnish over fair consequences, or to deny in words what was affirmed in the reasoning . . . where should I find that iron Chain of Logic, which neither man or angel could break, but which falls of itself by dissolving the rock of Ice, to which it is stapled—and which thou [Spinoza] in common with all thy contemporaries & predecessors didst mistake for a rock of adamant?” (CL, 4:548).
46. Speech and Language, 19, 31, 9, 27f., 39.
47. Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille, 1:268 (§36).
48. CN, no. 4109, f129; Coleridge here reiterates his earlier discussion of mechanism as in effect negating the very notion of person, soul, will, or some version of incommunicabilis: “The soul becomes a mere ens logicum, . . . present only to be pinched or stroked . . . Accordingly, this caput mortuum of the Hartleian process has been rejected by his followers, and the consciousness considered as a result, as a tune, the common product of the breeze and the harp: tho’ this again is the mere remotion of one absurdity to make way for another, equally preposterous. For what is harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percipi” (BL, 1:117–118).
49. CN, no. 4109, f129v; on the self-dismantling logic of materialist and associationist models, see also BL, 1:119, 133–136.
50. “If the will originate in motives, in what do the motives originate? . . . It is not the motives [that] govern the man, but it is the man that makes the motives” (OM, 33).
51. Gehlen, Der Mensch, 32; Eng. Man, 24.
52. Jacobi, Philosophical Writings, 231, 277, 319; the first two quotes are from Jacobi’s highly controversial 1785 letters Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza, addressed to Moses Mendelssohn; on the I/Thou distinction set forth there, see also di Giovanni’s fine Introduction to his translation of Jacobi’s writings, esp. 63–65 and 92–94.