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“FAITH IS FIDELITY . . . TO THE CONSCIENCE”

Coleridge’s Ontology

Like most of those who, since late antiquity, participated in the ongoing clarification of person as an ontological idea, Coleridge emphasizes that the reality of the human being depends on an act of “recognition.” Beginning with his sharply worded, though always carefully reasoned arguments against the practice of slavery, Coleridge had understood “recognition” not merely as some abstract metaphysical injunction but, like person itself, as something woven into the very fabric of human existence. It is not something electively introduced into the empirical reality of communities and interpersonal relations but constitutive of that very reality. For even to imagine that one might not acknowledge the other as person but, instead, willfully treat him or her as a “thing” would strike us, no less than Coleridge, as inherently “dehumanizing”—not only of the other’s but also of our own self.1 Such abuses may well happen—indeed they often do—but they can never plausibly be justified as such but only by laborious schemes of circumlocution and re-description. Hence to say that recognition implies the practical acknowledgment of the other as being of equal dignity as the “I” means not so much to have advanced a neutral and formally contestable claim but to have grasped how the empirical, inter-subjective realm is saturated with normative values or ideas. Inasmuch as questions of community and relationality are matters of truth, not correctness, normativity signifies not in the manner of a “thou shalt” but, instead, points to the nature of the real itself and thus proves immune to some counterfactual scenario. What “recognition” of the other qua person thus denotes, and what renders it normative or “transcendent”—as opposed to some subjective “moral” choice or preference—is the intercalation of ontology and ethics. Recognition attests to the absolute givenness of community and, consequently, the incontestable reality of the good—to be conceived not as a speculative hypothesis but as an invitation, a possibility, a gift. Negatively put, community is not simply a function of technē; it can never be achieved by the conceptual and propositional logic of political argument. Nor should it be reduced to some distant utopia to be realized by the vociferous and adversarial transactionalism of liberalism’s so-called public sphere (Jürgen Habermas’s Öffentlichkeit). For while open and earnest debate over what constitutes a just, equitable, and humane community is a crucial component of our collective flourishing, its underlying prompt is that community is not simply a “construct” (or “contract”) but something ontologically given; and human thought can (and ought to) relate to this very givenness with ever increasing articulacy.

For Emmanuel Levinas, community is “produced within the general economy of being only as proceeding from the I to the other, as a face to face” (TI, 39); its core unit is the reality of the person in relation to a Thou, not an abstract political theorem. Opposing Heidegger’s Fundamentalontologie, Levinas insists that for us to understand the I as person “it is necessary to begin with the concrete relationship between an I and a world” (TI, 37). Though working from within different intellectual and religious genealogies than the ones traced thus far (the exception being a shared engagement with phenomenology), Levinas reaches remarkably similar conclusions to those progressively articulated by Boethius and Richard of St. Victor. First and foremost, the I or self cannot be grasped by a unilateral and self-certifying act of definition. Levinas’s objection here is not simply epistemological in nature. Thus he regards the modern ideal of “autonomy” as both epistemologically incoherent and, to the extent that one seeks to pursue it all the same, deeply unethical. An extreme version of that project would be Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s deduction of I and non-I in the 1794 Science of Knowledge, for it causes alterity to be “reabsorbed into my own identity as a thinker or a possessor.” In sharp contrast to such models of selfhood as proprietas and dominium, Levinas locates the essence of personhood in what he calls “metaphysical desire.” Tending “toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other,” such desire is aimed at the realization of a potential within the desiring subject, rather than at extinguishing the desire itself through an act of possession: “It is like goodness—the Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it” (TI, 33–34). The Platonic background (frankly acknowledged in the opening pages of Totality and Infinity) subtends much of what follows, albeit only up to a point that remains to be demarcated. The relationship between the desiring subject and that which it desires does not pivot on “the disappearance of distance” but on what Levinas calls “generosity.” Metaphysical desire is most consummately realized in the reciprocal acknowledgment of the other by the “I” (and, hence, of the I as its own other) in the face-to-face encounter. Crucially, desire of this nature is not pragmatic; it does not seek fulfillment but proceeds “aimlessly . . . toward an absolute, unanticipatable reality” (TI, 34). The adverbial qualifier (“aimlessly”) is crucial here in that it shows the encounter with the other, and indeed with life, to depend on the Zen-like emptying out of self, a suspension of all pragmatic objectives, beginning with modernity’s axiomatic objective of total self-possession and its concurrent assertion of rights. In alerting us to the sheer “irreducibility of movement to inward play, to a simple presence of self to self” (TI, 35), what Levinas calls “transcendence” or “absolute exteriority” bears remarkable affinities to Coleridge’s conception of personhood.

Central to both Coleridge’s Platonizing and Levinas’s existential approach is the relational and reciprocal embeddedness of persons in and as a community. Crucially, relation here neither seeks to integrate the other into the self nor to bring about some virtual (imaginary) identification on the order of Adam Smith’s sympathetic community. The objective here is not one of appropriation, transference, or some other dialectical or psychoanalytic trope by which to systematize and methodically delimit the I-Thou relation: “The absolutely other is the Other [L’absolument Autre, c’est Autrui]. He and I do not form a number. The collectivity in which I say ‘you’ or ‘we’ is not a plural of the ‘I.’ I, you—these are not individuals of a common concept” (TI, 39). In ways strikingly analogous to Trinitarian theology, the other saves the I from the perennial threat of solipsistic and totalizing projection. To imagine—whether in Platonic, Judaic, or Christian discourse—an absolute good is, therefore, to imagine that being eternally contains an other, a reality of equal dignity, and that it acknowledges that alterity as such—viz., in the modality of an infinite relation rather than some anticipated utopia in which that other is to be re-absorbed into the One.2 Essential to the idea of the divine and the good is thus the notion of infinity; or, as Levinas puts it, “the idea of the perfect is an idea of infinity.” By nature, infinity transcends the realm of the discursive and its proprietary outlook on the business of thinking and conceptualization: “perfection exceeds conception, overflows the concept; it designates distance” (TI, 41). For Coleridge as for Levinas, this “transcendence” or “transascendence” (TI, 35) constitutes the innermost essence of thought itself. It is radically imaginative, counterfactual, and indeed utopian in nature—not by opposing the “imperfect” or envisioning its eventual “correction,” but as an openness to the unknown, the unpredictable, the unsought-for within the “I” itself. Whereas “negativity is incapable of transcendence,” the idea which alone enables mind to participate in the good pivots on the self opening itself to the unconditionally other. Levinas’s formulation is strikingly similar to Coleridge’s neo-Platonic notion of reason (logos) as the imago dei: “Transcendence designates a relation with a reality infinitely distant from my own reality, yet without this distance destroying this relation and without this relation destroying the distance” (TI, 41).

To help identify the point at which, crucially, Coleridge’s and Levinas’s models of person and community diverge, some additional moments of significant convergence first need to be specified. Against Heidegger’s Fundamentalontologie, which “affirms freedom over ethics,” thereby “neutralizing the existent in order to comprehend it” (TI, 45–46), Levinas develops a fundamentally mystical, anti-modern stance. Though well aware that Heidegger’s objective in Being and Time had been to undertake a comprehensive critique of modernity’s “obliviousness of Being” (Seinsvergessenheit), Levinas rejects the abstract and value-neutral understanding of Sein that Heidegger seems intent on recovering. Anticipating the sharp critique of the fact/value distinction by writers like Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Alasdair MacIntyre, Levinas rejects modernity’s leading paradigm of knowledge as “thematization and conceptualization.” For in taking possession of the object within a categorical framework we invariably account for it in terms of what it is not (as per Spinoza’s omnis determinatio est negatio), thereby conceiving knowledge as something altogether “impersonal.” The result, in Levinas’s strident phrase, is a “philosophy of injustice” (TI, 46). Plato (as indeed Coleridge himself) might have simply called it a philosophy that no longer offers a conceptual or imaginative space for love—which might itself be the most salient characteristic of philosophical modernity. Levinas’s alternative project of retrieving “a non-allergic relation with alterity” by maintaining “within anonymous community, the society of the I with the Other—language and goodness,” must not be confused with nominalism’s quest for the ultimate particular. For the latter’s methodological restriction of knowledge to warranted and “certain” propositions about singular entities is itself prompted by the deep-seated anxiety that some aspect of the other—now framed as an “object”—might yet elude our conceptual possession of it.

By contrast, the human person, whose incommunicable and relational nature a millennium of theological reflection had gradually distilled as its essential trait, brings us face to face (no mere figure of speech) with a singularity that can be known only if we relate to it in a non-possessive, non-proprietary mode. For Levinas, the face of the other is the most concrete instance of infinity. Once again, we must be on guard against modernity’s almost axiomatic appraisal of infinity as a utopia, the “not-yet” of continual “progress” toward some ultimate, speculative vantage-point where material reality and our conceptualizations of it shall converge. Even a writer as committed to the modern project as George Eliot had questioned precisely this “tendency, created by the splendid conquests of modern generalization, to believe that all social questions are merged in economical science, and that the relations of men to their neighbours may be settled by algebraic equations.”3 The Platonic and Christian (personalist) conception on which, at this point in his argument, Levinas is relying to a surprising degree, does not conceive infinity as mere “deferral” or “projection” but as something in which we may participate to the extent that we reject appropriative models of knowledge. Repeatedly drawing on the Phaedrus, Levinas thus notes how to “think the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger, is . . . not to think an object” but, rather, to acknowledge that the very “ideatum [of infinity] surpasses its idea.” Singular, inescapably present, and in its sheer charisma (Grk. χάρις = grace, loveliness, gift) soliciting our utmost engagement, the face of the other “concretiz[es] the idea of infinity.” It is a “living presence, . . . expression” and, indeed, “already discourse.” Here “meaning is not produced as an ideal [value-neutral, objective, impersonal] essence; it is said and taught by presence” (TI, 50, 66).

While overtones of Jacques Lacan (particularly the Rome discourse on “Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”) are unmistakable here, Levinas’s aim is fundamentally different. It is not to solve a puzzle or remediate a psychological dilemma or impasse. Nor indeed does he seek to recover through patient exegesis some presupposed symptomatic formation. In short, Levinas’s “encounter” is not a variation on modernity’s paradigmatic understanding of knowledge as analysis and critique, both fueled by a desire to achieve certainty by means of detachment and prevarication. Instead, and echoing Coleridge’s distrust of an interventionist and transactional epistemology pursued by a “finger-active, brain-lazy” understanding (CM, 2:648), Levinas seems to be formulating a mysticism of deeply personal and incommunicable dimensions. Its dominant mode, for which Platonic “love” (as ēros and agapē) provides the initial template, is one of relation, which he understands as participation in alterity. To know for Levinas involves neither the attempt nor the presumption to overcome the distance between the self and the face of the other; rather,

the way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face . . . The face brings a notion of truth which, in contradistinction to contemporary ontology, is not the disclosure of an impersonal Neuter, but expression . . . The first content of expression is the expression itself. To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which, at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other is a non-allergic reaction, an ethical relation. (TI, 50–51)

In multiple senses, Levinas’s argument bears on Coleridge’s exploration of the I-Thou dialectic, which in turn elucidates the ontological status of “conscience.” First, the above passage reflects his resistance to the axiom that the legitimacy of knowledge pivots on some invariant, abstract, and putatively self-evident method. The mystic in Levinas (no less than in Coleridge) resists the contraction of knowledge to what is methodologically licensed and verifiably apparent. Hence the operative tropes in Levinas’s argument all point to a moment of radical unpredictability and, consequently, to a quality of excess notably linked to the idea of ekstasis—itself a recurrent motif of Christian mysticism from Augustine to Meister Eckhart to William Blake.4 The true encounter involves not just being face to face with the other; rather, it is realized at the precise moment when he or she “exceed[s] the idea of the other in me.” In markedly Platonic and, even more so, Augustinian terms, Levinas’s other is a gift (donum) inasmuch as I “receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I.”

Reflecting on the quality that, for Plato, defines the relation of consciousness to ideas, Levinas remarks how “thought, for Plato, is not reducible to an impersonal concatenation of true relations, but implies persons and interpersonal relations.” He extends this observation into a fiercely anti-rhetorical conception of thought and discourse: “Justice . . . is access to the Other outside of rhetoric, which is ruse, emprise, and exploitation. And in this sense justice coincides with the overcoming of rhetoric” (TI, 71–72). Such a mystical account, however, seems more Plotinian and neo-Platonist in character than Platonic. Not even Augustine, and certainly not Plato, stigmatizes, let alone proscribes rhetoric in this manner, as even a casual reading of the acutely and self-consciously rhetorical delight in moving beyond rhetoric (e.g., Phaedrus) or a more pointed and rhetorically skilled questioning of the Sophists’ rhetoric (e.g., Gorgias, Sophist) makes abundantly clear.5 If to receive in this sense means “to be taught,” then learning itself must be rethought. No longer does it involve the unilateral acquisition or harvesting of information. Rather, it involves a transformation. Crucially, however, we are not to envision here some transformation of the self but, rather, the unveiling of something anterior, more significant, more true than anything that could be ascertained in terms controlled by the self. Introducing (however inadvertently) a key trope of high Scholasticism, Levinas calls it “participation”—that is, “a way of referring to the other, . . . to have and unfold one’s own being without at any point losing contact with the other.” Notably, Levinas also speaks of a “conversion of the soul to exteriority, to the absolutely other, to Infinity” (TI, 61). Inasmuch as this mystical “encounter” and the community it instantiates appears to belong to the realm of metaphysics, it bears remembering that the encounter can only ever be conceived apophatically and in explicit departure from the conventions of quotidian, referential speech: “to signify is not to give,” he insists, yet as Coleridge’s example of the infant-mother dialectic seeks to show, the meaning of the other can only be realized as a gift. Opposing strictly transactional models of community, Levinas thus insists that “meaning is not produced as an ideal essence; it is said and taught by presence” (TI, 66).

Levinas’s overarching concern with “exteriority” bars him from construing the “encounter” or “relation” in terms of inter-subjectivity. In his thought, relation is not a derivative but a founding concept, for it alone constitutes and consummates the existents as ethical beings. By contrast, certainly in Levinas’s account, the proposition of a hermetically enclosed, modern subject on the order of Descartes’s cogito, Locke’s “consciousness,” Kant’s “apperception,” or Fichte’s Tathandlung fatally divides epistemology from ethics. Levinas also holds that an ethical relation cannot be recovered after the fact— say, as some form of social contract or as a sympathetic community anchored in “moral sentiments” supposed to counteract modern society’s transformation into a mere enterprise association. For to construe relations solely in legal, affective, deontological, or utilitarian terms is to have already (mis)conceived person as a non-cognitive and somatically conditioned will incapable of self-transcendence and, hence, in need of perpetual supervision and “management” by disciplinary, institutional mechanisms. Such a self, as Plato and, echoing him, Levinas point out, remains forever encased by its “interiority”—itself but an entropic space of unfathomable desires and compulsions and, as Hobbes saw it, leaving the person bereft of the space for (self-)transcendence—viz., the “clearing” (Hölderlin’s das Offene, Heidegger’s Lichtung)—where the putative determinants of consciousness might be transmuted into possible interpretations, choices, and judgments by consciousness. Sociality in the modern sense is thus never thought as anything but a correlation of irremediably hermetic, not to say, autistic subjectivities. Yet, as Levinas puts it (in italics), “correlation does not suffice as a category for transcendence” (TI, 53).

A fascinating convergence of early patristic thought with Jewish mysticism (ancient and modern) opens up here, one that directly bears on the ongoing debate concerning Augustine’s alleged understanding of person as “inwardness.” In a widely quoted article, Joseph Ratzinger has proposed a conception of personhood as relationality that substantially mirrors Emmanuel Levinas’s and Martin Buber’s accounts. Recalling the derivation of person from the Greek prosōpon, Ratzinger notes how the “dialogical roles introduced by the prophets are not mere literary devices. The ‘role’ truly exists; it is the prosōpon, the face, the person of the Logos who truly speaks here and joins in dialogue with the prophet.” To inhabit a role is not, as modern theories of performativity frequently imply, evidence of a merely acquired, transient, and ipso facto inauthentic role; on the contrary, it points toward a deeper realization of the person as relational, as “pure act-being.” In Trinitarian theology, persons thus are emphatically “not substances that stand next to each other, but they are real existing relations, and nothing besides.”6 Even so, the Trinitarian idea of community as relation in its very essence risks presenting us with a vision that is categorically unattainable, which is to say, “transcendent” in the modern sense of something manifestly implausible, if not positively utopian. Ratzinger’s overriding concern here is to counter a tendency within formal Trinitarian theology that had “limited these categories [of existence and relation] to Christology,” thereby effectively “treat[ing] the whole thing as a theological exception, as it were.” Yet Christ, he goes on to note, has to be understood “as the true fulfillment of the idea of the human person, . . . not the ontological exception.” Then, and only then, does the Trinitarian model of Christ signify for us, viz., “as an indication for theology of how person is to be understood as such.”7 We recall Coleridge worrying that the exceptionalist views driving conceptual, systematic theology are liable to eclipse the founding ethical motive behind the entire enterprise: “Christ must become Man—but he cannot become us, except as far as we become him” (CL, 4:849). Where Levinas rejects the Cartesian cogito and the idea of the human being qua “interiority” (a “separation . . . from historical time in which totality is constituted” [TI, 55]), Ratzinger likewise warns against misconstruing person as “a substance that closes itself in itself.” Drawing on Carl Andresen’s scrupulous research into the (in part) Judaic origins of the Trinitarian conception of personhood, Ratzinger also acknowledges its sources “in the Judaism of antiquity, in which the idea is already formulated that the emissary, inasmuch as he is an emissary, is not important in himself” and that, consequently, “a word is essentially from someone else and toward someone else; word is existence that is completely path and openness.”8

That, however, is as far as the similarities go. Levinas’s argument now takes a unique turn away from theistic speculation and, in so doing, allows us to mark the divergence between Coleridge’s Trinitarian framework and a post-existentialist mysticism set forth in Totality and Infinity. For Levinas, the “noumenon” of infinity “is to be distinguished from the concept of God possessed by the believers of positive religions . . . who accept being immersed in a myth unknown to themselves” (TI, 77; italics mine). His arguments in this regard have been more recently taken up and extended by Jean-Luc Nancy who, in The Inoperative Community, insists that “the thinking of community as essence is in effect the closure of the political . . . because it assigns to community a common being, whereas community is a matter of . . . existence inasmuch as it is in common, but without letting itself be absorbed into a common substance.” Like Levinas, that is, Nancy insists on understanding community as the sustained experience and realization of one’s “finitude” and, thus, of “no longer having, in any form, in any empirical or ideal place . . . a substantial identity, and sharing this (narcissistic) ‘lack of identity.’”9 Levinas’s and Nancy’s unyielding resistance to a language that would merge discrete individuals into a transcendent (communal) essence is a shared, quasi-habitual gesture of post-Enlightenment intellectuals. Both thinkers suspect that it is a small step from imagining a real existent community to the violent expurgation of difference in the name of some mythical essence. Such fears are well founded, not only in light of the twentieth century’s horrific record of totalitarian ideology but also, if more subtly, as regards strictly fideist, evangelical models of religion that treat belief in such a transcendent essence as some kind of definitive, counterfactual certitude and spiritual property.

Yet Coleridge, who holds that “a Conception of God . . . is an Absurdity” (CM, 1:237), had long looked with great suspicion on the antinomian and irrational tendencies of radical Protestantism. In the Opus Maximum, he makes his misgivings especially clear: “no man serves God with a good conscience that serves him against his reason, [and] in no case can true reason and a right faith oppose each other” (OM, 57). Like Newman, whose Oxford University Sermons were to echo this view so eloquently just a few years later, Coleridge rejects an exclusively noumenal understanding of faith. Demurring neo-Platonism’s institution of an “infinite chasm between the Begotten and the Commanded, the eternal Son and the Creature in Time, . . . Proclus especially (the Philosophers with increasing extravagance from Plotinus to Proclus) endeavored vainly to fill up with orders & scales of Gods, Ladders resting at the very footstool of the throne.” The principal failure of neo-Platonism lies in its inability to extricate itself from the Gnostic legacy and its consequent inability to develop a phenomenology of empirical consciousness and life oriented toward an unconditional, uncreated good. Instead, neo-Platonism’s affirmation of a wholly distinct and separate noumenal realm (“the interest in another Life & another world”) hinges on the systematic devaluation, even despair of the finite, empirical realm (“when this Life had lost its charms”). Paradoxically, the long-term result is at once an aggressive valorizing and emptying out of the noumenon, manifest in the “gradual conjunction of the speculations of Philosophy with the Passions & idols of Superstition . . . till it reached its ne plus ultra in Proclus’s School, & went out!” (CN, no. 3824, f112v–113v). After 1805, the critique of fideist, Unitarian, let alone deist models of religion steadily intensifies in Coleridge’s writings. It prompts him to desynonymize “enthusiasm” and “fanaticism” (see his Marginalia on Birch, CM, 1:495–496), and in his late work prompts him to oppose any form of organized religion that premises its faith on the opposition of faith and reason:

I would it were as uncommon, as to every well disciplined mind it is fearful, to hear religionists boast of having sacrificed their reason to their faith, and set up against a certain pretence and usurpation of the <mere irrational> understanding . . . a pretence to sensible raptures, transports of pain or pleasure . . . The utter contrast of this habit and of these principles with that individual faith which demands the first fruits of the whole man, of his intellectual powers, therefore command required of us not our sensations but the subjugation always, the exclusion often, and sometimes the entire sacrifice of our sensations and fancies—that full faith in the intelligential.10

Coleridge’s objections here substantially anticipate the thrust of Levinas’s eventual critique, though with the crucial difference that for Coleridge it is yet possible—indeed of pivotal importance—to think the noumenon through the phenomenon, understood as something “given” and by no means implying the imposition of a totality. In an 1818 letter to Hyman Hurwitz, he extends this principle to the language of scripture itself, arguing “that the sacred Writers could only have employed the only permanent, infallible, and suo genere most philosophical, Language, that of appearances” (CL, 4:871). Coleridge’s ontology of conscience is neither prescriptive nor systematic. Rather, it arises from a description of the infinitely complex and layered phenomenology of human, self-conscious existence. For his part, Levinas presses on, arguing that “the idea of infinity . . . is the dawn of a humanity without myths” and that insofar as it has been “purged of myths, the monotheist faith . . . implies metaphysical atheism. [It is] an ethical behavior, and not theology, not a thematization, be it a knowledge by analogy, of the attributes of God” (TI, 77–78). Levinas’s rejection of any noumenal terms in philosophy assumes that ontology inevitably drives toward totality, and that it casts before it the shadow of injustice by tending toward the monolithic and the inhuman. Coleridge’s own conclusions in this regard are not dissimilar, though his profound and far-flung grasp of philosophical theology also allows him to see that the true source of such misgivings is to be found in Gnosticism’s dualist metaphysics. In the modern era, the same dualism reappears in the guise of Socinianism, Unitarianism, and, eventually, as a deism dressed up in the specious garb of William Paley’s Evidences and Natural Theology. As Coleridge so clearly came to understand, metaphysical totalization had migrated from Scholastic voluntarism into various strains of radical Protestantism, Puritan antinomianism, and late seventeenth-century Pietism according to which the integrity of faith presupposed what Philipp J. Spener termed the believer’s “utter abjection” (vollständige Zerknirschung). Such a view renders empirical community and divine authority categorically incommensurable, a deplorable outcome for which William of Ockham’s divine command ethic had significantly helped pave the way. To inquire into divine personhood and the significance of the Trinity seemed increasingly pointless, simply because the very notion that the relation of the three persons might exemplify or prefigure the ethical requirements and potentialities of human community had been rejected out of hand.

Coleridge’s deeply considered Trinitarianism after 1805 does not expose him to the otherwise understandable charges of irrationalism and injustice that cause Levinas to reject Christian theology’s conception of the noumenal as strictly exceptional and unintelligible. In discussing Coleridge’s striking anticipation of Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (1923), Thomas McFarland notes that, unlike Buber, Coleridge understands the I-Thou relationship as “a deduction from the nature of consciousness, rather than an axiom of experience” (OM, cxxxix). This is certainly true, and it further shows the proximity of Coleridge’s conception of consciousness to Levinas’s assertion of “the primacy of the ethical” and his claim that “it is not the insufficiency of the I that prevents totalization, but the Infinity of the Other” (TI, 79–80). Unlike Buber, Coleridge understands the relation of I to Thou not as an experiential datum but as the ontological matrix of human consciousness that he interprets a fortiori as self-consciousness. The very notion of self-consciousness can thus be traced back to that of conscience and, when we do so, reveals to us the implicit presence and categorical anteriority of a “Thou” within the “I,” it being understood that the “I” must act in order to achieve this awareness of its ethical reality and profound relatedness. In pursuing this phenomenology of the “I” as something that acquires reality and meaning only by virtue of its relatedness to and participation in the reality of the other, Coleridge is able to link the Trinitarian (ostensibly metaphysical) idea of person to the realm of finite, human experience. To adopt this model is

to know something in its relation to myself in and with the act of knowing myself as acted on by that something, and proceed to prove the dependence of all consciousness on a self-consciousness, thus: the third pronoun “he,” “it,” etc. could never have been contradistinguished from the first “I,” “me,” etc. but by means of the second. There could be no “He” without a previous “Thou,” and I scarcely need add that without a “Thou” there could be no opposite, and of course no distinct or conscious sense of the term “I’” as far as the consciousness is concerned, without a “Thou.” (OM, 74–75)

The I-Thou dyad “is the root of all human consciousness, and à fortiori the pre-condition of all experience; and therefore . . . the conscience in its first revelation cannot have been deduced from experience. Q. E. D.” This is what Coleridge means by “the necessity and universality of the relations” (OM, 76–77). What Coleridge calls the “equation of Thou with I by means of a free act [of the Will] <by> which <we> negate the sameness in order establish the equality . . . is the true definition of Conscience” (OM, 76). Not only does this argument hold extraordinary implications for thinking about community—to be explored momentarily—but it also tells us that the self and its other are not related to one another simply by contingent “experience” but ontologically. To speak of a self-conscious person is to imply an inner differentiation that already encompasses a Thou, thereby anchoring community in the primacy of the ethical rather than in some contingently negotiated framework of political, legal, or human rights.11

At the same time, Coleridge acknowledges that experience can often obscure, even obliterate this ontological relatedness or community by foregrounding “other impulses besides the dictates of conscience.” To “preserv[e] our loyalty and fealty against these rivals” is for Coleridge the very essence and definition of faith: “Faith is fidelity, but all human fidelity that is consistent with itself is fidelity to the conscience” (OM, 78). This is a powerful argument, to be sure, though one with significant hazards of its own. In particular, Coleridge here risks sliding back into a strictly interiorist model of personhood and, in so doing, to conceive of relatedness and community in a distinctly modern sense after all—viz., as an aggregation or “civil association” based on a social contract or other prudential, calculative alignment of interests worked out among individual “subjects” whose motives Ockham’s and Hobbes’ voluntarism had rendered terminally self-enclosed, opaque, and irrational. Needless to say, this is not a scenario Coleridge means to endorse; still, his understanding of the dynamics of “conscience” and its claims on the person remains as yet unclear. It is one thing to argue that “consciousness properly human (i.e. Self-consciousness) . . . presupposes the Conscience, as its antecedent Condition and Ground” (AR, 125). Yet absent a precise phenomenological account of how the relational, participatory reality of the person qua conscience manifests itself little will have been gained. For conscience to be recognized and acknowledged as the source of personhood it cannot merely be claimed to be so but must disclose itself in ways at once distinctive and irrefutable. The difference here is that between metaphysics, where claims are eo ipso contestable (albeit only by other metaphysical claims rather than by outright falsification) and ontology. Inasmuch as the latter stakes out the very nature of rational existence, its affirmations can neither be verified nor opposed because ontology conditions the very possibility of rational argument and discursive practice, as well as those “notices” or phenomena to which a given philosophical position takes itself to be referring. As regards Coleridge’s ideas of person and conscience, his argument resembles Anselm’s ontological proof of God. It is not that in referring to our conscience we predicatively affirm its existence. Rather, the nonexistence of conscience is not even conceivable without concurrently disputing the reality and distinctiveness of the reasoning agent, the human person as an incommunicable, rational existence possessed of a responsible will.

Kant’s objection to Anselm’s proof, while formally valid, ultimately misses the point simply because it is not the “existence” but the “necessity” of God that Anselm had meant to affirm.12 Analogously, Coleridge also holds the supposition of conscience’s nonexistence to be impossible. Thus to refer to it is not to make a metaphysical claim, let alone to venture an epistemological hypothesis, but to acknowledge the reality of something that gives or discloses itself prior to labors of propositional and discursive understanding. Conscience cannot be construed as an inward “state” or quality but, in virtue of its distinctive phenomenology, constitutes a real and manifest event. Coleridge thus notes how “the first step that . . . the becoming conscious of a conscience partakes of [is] of the nature of an act” (OM, 72; italics mine). As an act, conscience produces its own reality and thus transcends the merely contingent, psychological, and interiorist language of certitudes, convictions, and feelings: “the Me in the objective case is clearly distinct from the Ego” (CL, 4:849). The act of conscience first manifests itself to the person, which in turn involves “an act . . . by which we take upon ourselves an allegiance, and consequently the obligations of fealty” (OM, 72). To the extent that this pattern of phenomenologically discrete acts unfolds within us, conscience proves generative of faith and thus mediates or reveals the ontology of the logos (reason in the relational modality of the Trinity). Yet if “the reason in man is the representative of the Will of God” (OM, 84), conscience—precisely because it relates the finite person to the logos—cannot be subject to the human will. Rather, it “subsists in the synthesis of the reason and the individual Will, or the reconcilement of the reason with the Will, by the self-subordination of the Will to the reason.”13 Conscience, in other words, must not be misconstrued as some garden-variety intentional experience, such as an act of expressive self-reference or propositional self-explanation. Rather, it is an instance of “self-presence, in which I encounter myself not objectively but subjectively.”14

At first glance, all talk of conscience and its putative transcendence of ordinary intentionality would appear to invite back with a vengeance the post-structuralist critique of logo- and phono-centrism that has so galvanized the philosophically (not to mention theologically) jejune establishment of American literary theory beginning in the late 1960s. Yet as Coleridge and, eventually, John Henry Newman make abundantly clear, the subjective self-presence that transpires both in and as the phenomenon of conscience is emphatically not an instance of modern autonomy or enlightened self-possession. Rather, to recall Coleridge’s memorable formulation, it involves “a struggle of jarring impulses; a mysterious diversity between the injunctions of the mind and the elections of the will; and (last not least) the utter incommensurateness and the unsatisfying qualities of the things around us” (AR, 349). The reality of the person that is phenomenologically disclosed in the action of conscience involves the awareness of a conflict—one that is not simply present to us but in truly Augustinian fashion is properly constitutive of our being. If conscience involves self-presence, the intentional object here at issue is not a coherent autonomous self but, on the contrary, the growing awareness of that notion’s sheer impossibility due to an indelible inner division that cannot be overcome except within a transcendent framework of grace and a Platonic narrative movement toward a fuller comprehension of that fact. With the irrefutable valuations of conscience serving as its phenomenological cue and first object, faith (in Coleridge’s account) is emphatically not the antithesis of reason but, on the contrary, the most comprehensive acknowledgment of the ontology of the logos. It would thus be a category mistake to try and construe faith as an empirical phenomenon, such as an ephemeral disposition or transient “experience” that occasionally intrudes on an otherwise orderly and neutral consciousness.

Here Coleridge markedly diverges from Kant, whose loosely Platonic account of the “moral law” within us he had otherwise admired. For Coleridge, as for Augustine long before and Newman shortly afterward, any attempt at compartmentalizing the person into an alternately judging, thinking, desiring, or reflecting consciousness is fundamentally misguided.15 Far more in the spirit of Plato—whose theory of anamnēsis and ēros provides the original template for Coleridge’s account of conscience and its orientation toward God—all these qualities of conscience, though distinct, form a single organic continuum. Faith is not an emotion, and neither are emotions something to be proscribed or subjugated in the neo-Stoic fashion that often creeps into Kant’s moral theory. Writing to J. H. Green in 1817, Coleridge distances himself from “the German Philosophers” (“much in several of them is unintelligible to me, and more unsatisfactory”) while struggling for a nuanced account of Kant:

But I make a division.—I reject Kant’s stoic principle, as false, unnatural, and even immoral, where in his Critik der Practischen Vernun[f]t he treats the affections as indifferent (ἀδιαφορά) in ethics, and would persuade us that a man who disliking, and without any feeling of Love for, Virtue yet acted virtuously, because and only because it was his Duty, is more worthy of our esteem, than the man whose affections were aidant to, and congruous with, his Conscience. For it would imply little less than that things not the Objects of the moral Will or under it’s [sic] controul were yet indispensable to it’s [sic] due practical direction. In other words, it would subvert his own System.16

Like Augustine, Coleridge regards the affective and the cognitive dimensions of human consciousness to be always entwined, and nowhere more so than in the way that we receive the “notices” of conscience as insistent, at times stunning and disorienting qualia (guilt, remorse, sorrow, etc.).

It is this continuum or, rather, co-inherence of thought and feeling in a myriad of qualia—distinct but organically related—which for Coleridge constitutes an unbroken interpretive and evaluative horizon. As Hans-Georg Gadamer would later note, this hermeneutic “horizon” is itself moving and evolving, a point strongly implicit in the late Coleridge, who conceives “personality in dynamic terms, as a matter of degrees in relation to the unity of will and Reason.” In elaborating an “anthropology oriented towards sanctification,”17 Coleridge thus identifies this evolving totality of the person as a hermeneutic, self-interpreting agent oriented toward an ultimate good; he calls it

faith, (faith, which is used here in the same sense as Kant uses the Will, as the ground of all particular acts of willing) is a total act of the soul: it is the whole state of the mind, or it is not at all! . . . Faith, in all its relations, subsists in the synthesis of the reason and the individual Will, or the reconcilement of the reason with the Will, by the self-subordination of the Will to the reason . . . Faith must be an energy, and inasmuch as it relates to the whole moral man, . . . [it] must be a Ttotal, not a Ppartial; it must be a continuous and ordinary, not a desultory or occasional, energy. (OM, 43, 94)

As regards the many permutations of our will (as desire, ambition, etc.), conscience furnishes the consummate instance of the Greek parakupsas that Coleridge analyzes elsewhere. It is the act whereby the human person, in addition to its constitutive self-awareness, recognizes its essential embeddedness in an ontology, a framework of values that are revealed, not propositionally asserted. Iris Murdoch, whose Platonist account often exhibits striking similarities with that of the late Coleridge, thus argues for “a moral unconscious” and insists that the “place, where we are at home, which we seem to leave and then return to . . . has moral colour, moral sensibility. We have a continuous sense of orientation. The concept of consciousness, the stream of consciousness, is animated by indicating a moral dimension. Our speech is moral speech, a constant use of the innumerable subtle normative words whereby (for better or worse) we texture the detail of our moral surround and steer our life of action.”18

Though Coleridge would likely have demurred at Murdoch’s unusual fusion of Platonism and atheism, his view of our “moral orientation” is largely the same. As the incontrovertible echo of God, the actus purissimus, conscience belongs to the domain of action and as such involves the entire person. For Coleridge it follows that we can never take a neutral, impersonal, and indifferent view of the logos any more than of the conscience through which it appears. In fact, the very proposition that we might look upon the logos askance or profess an agnostic outlook on it would have struck Coleridge as absurd or, literally, “preposterous” since to look thus indifferently (or even diffidently) on reason would itself presuppose a considered motive, a reason for doing so. Instead, the only conceivable and absolutely necessary relation to the logos is one of faith and, by implication, love. Relating to the logos as “the form of its reception,”19 faith orients the person toward an unconditional and forever unrealized hyper-good (to borrow Charles Taylor’s term). As such, faith (in Coleridge’s account) constitutes simultaneously an act of knowledge and of practical commitment, of intellect in fullest alignment with will. As Coleridge puts it, “all human fidelity that is consistent with itself is fidelity to the conscience” (OM, 78). As he knew all too well, it is of course always possible to ignore the bearing of conscience on one’s specific course of action, but any decision to do so will itself be colored and, in time, haunted by its defiance of (or willful indifference to) the logos.20

Here we need to attend to how normative conscience relates to ostensibly value-neutral (self-)consciousness. To that end, we recall Coleridge’s acknowledgment that “the experience or inward witnessing of the Conscience, . . . if <it be> at all must be unique and therefore cannot be supported by an Analogon. [It] therefore may be monstrated but cannot be demonstrated” (CN, no. 4605). Self-consciousness here relates to conscience the way the species-term “human being” relates to the incommunicability of the person. As Coleridge notes, my consciousness of a specific proposition (e.g., Kant’s categorical imperative) only holds significance because I know “with the same clearness, that it is a fact of which all men either are or ought to be conscious.” Mere sheer awareness of the moral law as a proposition does not yet establish my reality as a unique ethical being. Inasmuch as “I possess this consciousness as a man and not as the individual John or James,” such consciousness is “distinguished from all other acts of consciousness by its universality” (OM, 59). Yet since I also know that a proposition like the categorical imperative presupposes not only the reality of other conscious beings but also their knowledge of that proposition, my consciousness of it here carries over into my self-awareness as a being standing in a unique ethical relation to others.21 There is no fact/value distinction here, no impersonal perspective on the proposition at hand, no view from nowhere. In fact, ignorance of the Kantian moral law, Coleridge insists, effectively “establishes the non-personality of the ignorant.” Hence, and with “good right have mankind designated [this awareness of my ontological relatedness to and participation in the reality of the other] by a particular term and named it the Conscience.” Its absence or presence “determines whether any given subject be a thing or a person.” That Coleridge should have chosen for his example Kant’s categorical imperative is certainly no accident. For in so doing he is able to show that, if the formal propositions of Kant’s “moral law” are to secure uptake among their intended audience of rational agents, such a deontological model presupposes a fundamentally Platonic model of the human as communal, relational, and participatory. Against Kant’s attempt to produce an account of moral agency that mirrors the latter’s putative autonomy by presenting itself free of all metaphysical presuppositions, Coleridge insists that a moral philosophy solely based on rational, self-conscious, and abstract agency is impossible: “Paradoxical as it may sound to describe the conscience as the ground of all proper consciousness—anterior, therefore, to it in the order of thought, i.e., without reference to time—we yet doubt not of establishing the truth . . . of the underived, unconditional authority of the Conscience” (OM, 59–60).

Our quotidian “work of attention,” Iris Murdoch notes, “imperceptibly builds up structures of value round about us.” She proceeds to offer a counterfactual example so as to illustrate that everyday practice and its encoding in ordinary language affords us orientation, order, and purpose precisely because it is cued by a transcendent good: “What of the command ‘Be ye therefore perfect’? Would it not be more sensible to say ‘Be ye therefore slightly improved’?”22 As the intuitively absurd alternative makes clear, normativity by its very nature presupposes a transcendent orientation. Absent an “idea of perfection,” it becomes an empty term, and values merely negotiated and affirmed in historically contingent (and likely opportunistic) fashion are not values at all. For in the latter case, Coleridge notes, value remains but a “generalization,” which is to say, “a Substitute for Intuition” (AR, 275n). The attempt to contain moral reflection within a “prudential” calculus of interests to be negotiated (e.g., in Paley and Bentham), as well as Kant’s restriction of moral reasoning to our formal assent to an impersonal “moral law,” fail because they cannot specify a “source” or normative good such as would induce us to follow that route. A chasm separates formal-syllogistic claims of the understanding from the ideas of the good and of justice. Belonging to the latter realm, justice cannot be thought in counterfactual or propositional terms. Like Levinas’s “infinity,” Plato’s good (agathon) and justice (dikē) prove “exceptional in that [in each case the] ideatum surpasses its idea.” Indeed, for us to conclude that our interpretation of a normative good or ideatum conflicts with someone else’s we have to be already persuaded that our dispute centers on the same identical notion. As Levinas puts it, “the distance that separates the ideatum and idea here constitutes the content of the ideatum itself” (TI, 49). Likewise, Coleridge insists that “truth is indeed a necessary attribute of goodness, but while we must receive the truth for the truth’s sake, we love it only because it is good.” Any allegiance to an idea necessarily originates in an act of intuition; we see that it is good “because we need only contemplate it as realized in its effects to perceive that it is necessarily and eminently true” (OM, 151).

By contrast, a deontological (Kantian), calculative (Benthamite), or consequentialist moral philosophy, however consistent in its propositional structure, will inevitably fail to secure our allegiance as long as it proceeds by playing off its syllogistic account against the supposed opacity and indefensibility of our moral intuition. Echoing Blaise Pascal (“Principles are felt; propositions proved”),23 Newman in 1841 remarks how “many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion. A Conclusion is but an opinion; it is not a thing which is, but which we are ‘certain about’ . . . Logicians are more set upon concluding rightly, than on right conclusions. They cannot see the end for the process.”24 With that much, it appears, Coleridge would certainly have concurred. Thus, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he specifically faults Socrates for assuming that human virtue is seated exclusively in the intellect rather than the will, and that it can be infused didactically rather than by habituation (LHP, 1:174–181). Moreover, Coleridge insists that to secure our assent to a specific view (as opposed to some conclusion such as may eventually be drawn from it), something more elemental is required in the realm of moral inquiry. Viz., we must acknowledge “the sacred distinction between Thing and Person, [for] on this distinction all Law human and divine is grounded: consequently, the law of Justice” (AR, 327). The distinction between a syllogistically effected “agreement” and the “recognition” of the person—in contradistinction to a “thing”—extends far beyond the merely intellectual and discursive. It discloses the categorical divide that separates the strictly discursive, racionative function of the understanding from the ideational and implicitly normative domain of reason.

An enduring motif in virtually all of Coleridge’s books and manuscripts after 1809, this distinction tends to occur within a more or less overtly Platonizing construction. An especially powerful instance is found early in Aids to Reflection, as Coleridge remarks on Robert Leighton’s appreciation of God’s ineffability vis-à-vis the inherently dissatisfying encounter “with the Objects of our bodily senses” (Aphorism XIIa). Calling Leighton’s remark “ingenious and startling,” Coleridge attempts to draw another, “more fruitful, perhaps more solid inference,” viz.,

that there is something in the human mind which makes it know (as soon as it is sufficiently awakened to reflect on its own thoughts and notices), that in all finite Quantity there is an Infinite, in all measures of Time an Eternal; that the latter are the basis, the substance, the true and abiding reality of the former; and that as we truly are, only as far as God is with us, so neither can we truly possess (i.e., enjoy) our Being or any other real Good, but by living in the sense of his holy presence. (AR, 92)

Quoted with much approval in Newman’s Grammar of Assent (1870), Coleridge’s passage relies in its opening image on the Platonic notion of anamnēsis (Meno, 81b–86d). Moreover, the argument implicitly endorses Plato’s doctrine of form as the indispensable ontological framework conditioning our apprehension of finite, empirical reality. Unlike Kant in the third Critique, however, Coleridge does not restrict “form” and “idea” (eidos) to a merely hypostatized and heuristic relation between the subject’s faculties of cognition. Rather, as the trope of “awakening” suggests, self-awareness involves not merely a functional synthesis on the order of Kant’s “transcendental apperception,” a construct that Kant took pains to keep distinct from the (in his view impermissible) inference of a “consciousness-of-self” or anything approaching the concept of person.25 For Coleridge, by contrast, to have been “sufficiently awakened to reflect on its own thoughts and notices” (italics mine) carries two crucial implications for human consciousness that Kant—consumed with the demonstrability and “certainty” of all epistemological claims and taking in general a dim view of any appeal to inner “certitudes”—simply could not endorse. Thus where Kant ventures the startling assertion that “reason in all its undertakings must subject itself to criticism,” and indeed that “reason depends on this freedom for its very existence,” Coleridge’s neo-Platonist account credits the logos with an absolute, ontological reality that in no way depends on our cognitive, critical pursuits. Already in 1806, he had written Thomas Clarkson that “Reason is . . . most eminently the Revelation of an immortal soul, and it’s [sic] best Synonime—it is the forma formans, which contains in itself the law of it’s [sic] own conceptions.” Just like person and existence, so soul is not a proposition to be demonstrated in the logical space of ordinary concepts: “What the Soul is, I dare not suppose myself capable of conceiving . . . Datur, non intelligitur” (CL, 2:1198, 1193).

To be sure, Plato, Aquinas, and Coleridge all maintain that our full realization as rational human agents and persons demands a continued effort at participating in the logos. Yet because reason and the eternity of forms is never contingent on this at best uneven progression, Coleridge does not endorse Kant’s often repeated claim that the only alternative to critique was some version of philosophical dogmatism.26 On strictly logical grounds alone, such a position is compromised by its manifestly self-certifying nature, for it is precisely our acceptance of the view that dogmatism is something to be rejected that licenses and seemingly compels a critique of reason in the first place. Kant’s proscription of alternative positions as “dogmatic” is not motivated by their point-by-point refutation but by their alleged failure to conform to the boundaries and procedures mapped by transcendental philosophy. As Stanley Rosen so succinctly puts it, Kant “constructs theoretical entities that serve his purpose. There is no empirical confirmation of Kant’s hypothesis, however, since what counts as experience, and also as confirmation, is created by our acceptance of the hypothesis.” Historically, then, the very project of a critique of reason constitutes indeed a historical caesura, albeit not quite in the way that Kant and his successors preferred to see it. For the crucial “moment of transition [is] itself produced not simply by historical circumstances but by Kant’s will to change those circumstances.”27 The alternative, never fully acknowledged by Kant, and almost completely foreclosed on in Fichte, would be that the “thoughts and notices” of consciousness might be taken as a metaphysical “gift” of sorts and, as such, might furnish the phenomenological conduit to the Platonic and Christian logos. This argument, so powerfully developed in the recent work of Jean-Luc Marion, naturally presupposes that the very notion of reason, which Kant’s first Critique proposes (or, rather, presupposes) to be in constant need of delimitation might turn out to be inherently evolving and in flux.

Reacting against both Enlightenment rationalism and its variously idealist and pessimist counterpoints (Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s anti-rationalism; Hume’s skepticism; Schelling’s pantheism, etc.), the late (Christian Platonist) Coleridge here seeks to reclaim an alternative model of reason. On his account, reason is not to be construed as the hegemonic and monolithic absolute that had begun to run amok in Paris sometime after 1792 and the memory of which is still being fought in the critique of logo-centrism and its administrative terrors in the early writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Stanley Rosen puts it well when observing that “postmodernism has no more rejected Kant than Kant rejected the Enlightenment. We are now [1987] living through the rhetorical frenzy of the latest attempt of the self-contradictory nature of Enlightenment to enforce itself as a solution to its own incoherence.” In fact, the later Coleridge’s profound exploration of will, conscience, and person develops a genuine alternative—a kind of Blakean contrary that transcends both the earnest but arid formalism of the Kantian subject and the rationalist dogmatism and Humean skepticism that Kant’s first Critique purports to have overcome. As Rosen puts it, “the greatest barrier separating Kant from Plato disappears as soon as we recognize that transcendental doctrine is a myth and also that to recognize it as such is not to abolish the psyche but to return it to itself.”28

While the beginnings of this argument in Coleridge’s oeuvre are subject to some debate, it certainly characterizes his overall project in Aids to Reflection, the Opus Maximum, and countless notebook entries after 1819. As he came to understand, there was no reason to suppose that the only alternative (if it is one at all) to an allegedly totalizing model of reason had to be a “critique” à la Kant—viz., a re-description of reason as a strictly virtual or “regulative” framework, a modest, strictly procedural utopia stripped of all transcendent meaning. To be sure, Coleridge concurs with Kant that reason must indeed be conceived as a dynamic, open-ended progression. Yet precisely this act of mind wherein reason discloses its progression, both at the level of individual-biographical time and across expanses of historical, trans-generational time, amounts to a real and inherently qualitative state of being, rather than some strictly formal and ostensibly value-neutral correlation of faculties. For Coleridge, moreover, the anteriority, indeed the unconditioned reality, of mind as the source of all those “thoughts and notices” on which even the most austere transcendental critique necessarily depends is never in question. Consequently, consciousness does not require its retroactive legitimation in terms acceptable to mere understanding. Where Kant posits apperception as a strictly coordinating function, and where Fichte and the young Schelling speak of the “fact of consciousness,” Coleridge insists that the phenomenological attention of consciousness to its own “thoughts and notices” constitutes a real and significant reality. More than “certainty” about X it furnishes the mind with “certitude” about its own status as a real and responsible agent. The knowledge at issue here is not some sterile fact but, however rudimentary, necessarily carries within itself the intimation of a value begging to be realized in progressively fuller form.29

The above passage from Aids to Reflection also implies that self-awareness cannot be construed as a secondary and derivative form but, belonging to the domain of qualia, is necessarily presupposed in any account of rational human personhood. Once again following Plato, not Kant, Coleridge insists on the absolute primacy of self-consciousness and stipulates that for a human being to be conscious means eo ipso to have awareness of oneself as a person—that is, as an incommunicable, rational existence that stands in a richly layered relation to other such beings. In developing this position by way of his powerful account of will and conscience, Coleridge meant above all to oppose (albeit not always in entirely fair-minded and nuanced ways) various materialist and deterministic accounts that sought to construe consciousness as a mere “something” produced by sensation or, at most, adventitiously reflecting on sensation. Such a position Coleridge regards as nonsensical, if only because to advance such an argument presupposes that we are already conscious of having the sensation in question—which is to say, are self-aware. For only on that premise could we ever wish to assign sensation a pole position in the race for an all-encompassing explanation of life. Given Coleridge’s vehement opposition to materialism in all its guises (“any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system” [CL, 2:709]), the crucial task of philosophy is not to elucidate the relationship of consciousness to the external world but, rather the dynamic and infinitely complex phenomenology of how it relates to the will. Though Newman was an infrequent reader of Coleridge, his one extended comment on the sage of Highgate happens to address precisely the above passage from Aids to Reflection30 and, with unerring instinct, distills its abiding import in a series of focused questions:

What is this an argument for? How few readers will enter into either premiss or conclusion! And of those who understand what it means, will not at least some confess that they understand it by fits and starts, not at all times? Can we ascertain its force by mood and figure? Is there any royal road by which we may indolently be carried along into the acceptance of it? Does not the author rightly number it among his “aids” for our “reflection,” not instruments for our compulsion? It is plain that, if the passage is worthy of any thing, we must secure that worth for our own use by the personal action of our own minds . . . And our preparation for understanding and making use of it will be the general state of our mental discipline and cultivation, our own experiences, our appreciation of religious ideas, the perspicacity and steadiness of our intellectual vision.31

Newman’s shrewd focus on the “mental discipline” required to make judicious and effective use of intellectual traditions eschews Coleridge’s omnivorous approach to intellectual inquiry. Though Newman, especially in his late Grammar of Assent, is just as concerned with notions of practical reason, judgment, responsibility, and will, his altogether different temperament also allows him to perceive the precariousness and partial failure of Coleridge’s undertaking. Too much of the traditions in question had irretrievably vanished, and Coleridge’s obsessive attempt at reclaiming and interweaving various strands of humanistic and theological thinking often risks obscuring the terminus ad quem of his overall enterprise. Too often, that is, the ultimate objective of Coleridge’s far-flung “abstruse research” into philosophical theology risks collapsing under the sheer weight of the machinery reassembled for the purpose. The reclamation of intellectual tradition only works if, as Cora Diamond was to note, the very loss of it is still felt, still registers as a palpable deficit in the minds of an envisioned audience. On precisely that point, however, Newman, herein far more the empiricist and pragmatic tactician than Coleridge, remains doubtful. Though he shares Coleridge’s perception of modernity as increasingly bereft of practical reason and all but oblivious of conceptual traditions extending nearly two millennia back, the controversialist Newman proves shrewdly selective when identifying relevant precursors and taking on intellectual debts (e.g., patristic thought, Duns Scotus, British empiricism, Joseph Butler). He also acknowledges that the recovery of any such tradition as a framework enabling the orientation of rational human beings in a social and hence moral space will only succeed if such a frame becomes the object of “real assent.” We cannot be argued into accepting a position such as the one Coleridge has so elaborately retrieved from Trinitarian theology and (neo-)Platonism. Rather, “we must secure that worth for our own use by the personal action of our own minds.” For if a prodigious mass of learning alone would enable us to reason others into assent, then Coleridge’s entire argument for an essentially self-originating will would collapse anyway.

For a variety of reasons, Coleridge’s project of reclaiming the idea of practical reason by retrieving and dialectically engaging complex and far-flung intellectual traditions was not taken up by succeeding generations. Overt criticisms and more tacit misgivings about his project originate from various quarters. There are Newman’s reservations about the later Coleridge’s excessively speculative proclivities and, in particular, about the failure of Coleridge’s theology to issue in a coherent and practical account of moral agency. As Newman’s implicit counter-position in the Grammar of Assent suggests, Coleridge’s hyper-Augustinian obsession with sin threatens to overwhelm the inherently dynamic nature of moral vision and agency with retrospective, at times even fatalist ruminations. As Newman sees it in the above passage, Aids to Reflection, its often breath-taking insights notwithstanding, lacks a clear objective, something also borne out by the book’s peculiar evolution from a florilegium of Archbishop Leighton’s theological writings to the “changeling” that eventually appeared in 1825, a work in which the proportion between text and commentary had decisively shifted toward the latter.32 Furthermore, the later Coleridge’s preoccupation with a fundamentally sinful will and his decision to anchor moral personhood almost exclusively in an ontology of conscience creates tensions of its own. For one thing, Coleridge’s radically interiorist account of human agency and responsibility does not quite align with his concurrent emphasis on the relationality of human personhood, just as his Platonism at times ultimately remains at odds with his Trinitarianism. Likewise, his preoccupation with the phenomenology of conscience at times also threatens to derail his ongoing arguments for the indispensable role of the ecclesia in realizing an authentic moral community. Despite Coleridge’s widely recognized significance for the consolidation of the Anglican Broad Church movement, his own reasoning does not extend beyond his enticing (albeit utopian) conception of a future “clerisy” charged with “cultivating and enlarging the knowledge already possessed, and . . . watching over the interests of physical and moral science, . . . thus connect[ing] the present with the future” (CCS, 43–44). To the end, Coleridge’s Augustinianism remains a rather one-sided affair whose emphatically interiorist character shows him, even in his late years, to have remained an exponent of the Romantic movement that he helped found and define during the first half of his career.

For these reasons, Coleridge’s project of reviving the ancient notion of practical reason by retrieving and dialectically engaging the complex intellectual traditions that, beginning with Plato, had allowed Western thought to develop a sophisticated conception of the human person as a “dependent rational animal” (to borrow Alasdair MacIntyre’s succinct formula) ultimately did not persuade his immediate successors. Nevertheless, the second half of the twentieth century saw a number of thinkers and intellectual historians (Reinhard Koselleck, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, John Milbank, among others) engaging again the logic of intellectual traditions and tabulating the potentially devastating consequences of their wholesale displacement. Time and again, the work of these critics echoes Coleridge’s ambitious, if flawed critique of modernity’s exclusively anthropomorphic conception of rationality as a “notion” or “system” of exclusively pragmatic value. Yet in the immediate aftermath of Coleridge, what takes shape is a fundamentally different development, a turn not toward complex and deep intellectual genealogies but toward an objective aesthetic, especially in John Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelite movement of the 1840s and 1850s. Here any noumenal or metaphysical commitments, to the extent that they exist at all, come into focus by means of a rigorous phenomenological analysis of the moment of vision as it is structured by the object of its attention. The focus moves from philosophy’s indebtedness to received intellectual traditions to a forensic account of present (perceptual) experience. Such a shift intimates the new generation’s discomfort with the ways in which the Romantics had sought to reinvest the individual with metaphysical (noumenal) meanings, yet also with Coleridge’s Platonizing variant of that project. Still, the change in intellectual orientation that is observable by the early 1840s does not involve a retreat onto the ostensibly safe ground of radical empiricism, materialism, or for that matter the late Enlightenment project of a “critique” of reason. Rather, the strong emphasis on the visual and the image that characterizes Ruskin’s aesthetics and that is also observable in its most profound extension, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetics, reflects attempts to develop a phenomenology of the human person by other means.33 It will be the matter of another book to show how, feeling at once estranged from the Enlightenment and alarmed by the sheer magnitude and evident incompletion of Coleridge’s attempted retrieval and idiosyncratic fusion of distant theological and philosophical genealogies, his heirs proceeded to rethink the human in emphatically objective terms, viz., by embarking on a rehabilitation of the image.

1. The OED credits Coleridge with the first use of “dehumanizing,” a word that appears in a notebook entry of 24 March 1808 (CN, no. 3281); see A. Taylor, Coleridge’s Defense, 13.

2. Clearly, it is the question of the eschaton that ultimately divides neo-Platonic and Christian thought from its Judaic counterpart. Yet it does so only in the context of the relationship borne by the human to the divine. As for the relational character of the Trinity, no such collapsing of the distinct Persons into one another is either envisioned or even held to be desirable. My argument in what follows is that it is the Trinitarian model that, for Coleridge (as for Richard, Boethius, and Augustine before him) constitutes the ideal of human community. By contrast, Coleridge tends to be ill at ease around end-of-times fantasies of an Evangelicalism just beginning to impact English religious culture, just as he remains wary of the irrational tendencies in Unitarianism, pantheism, and other offshoots of radical Protestantism. Though working overwhelmingly from within a Christian, Trinitarian tradition, the later Coleridge was deeply interested in Judaic thought, and he greatly valued his friendship with Hyman Hurwitz (1775–1844), a Polish émigré, scholar of Hebrew scriptures, and author of Vindiciae Hebraicae, Being a Defence of the Hebrew Scriptures as a Vehicle of Revealed Religion; for information on Coleridge’s friendship with Hurwitz, see CM, 2:1188–1189, and CL, 5:xxxvif. Coleridge translated two of Hurwitz’s Hebrew Dirges and read through the Vindiciae Hebraicae “sentence by sentence.” Expressing his delight to John Murray “that a learned, unprejudiced, & yet strictly orthodox Jew may be much nearer in point of faith & religious principles to a learned & strictly orthodox Christian, of the Church of England, than many called Christians” (CL, 5:92), Coleridge conducts some of his most searching epistolary discussions of theology with Hurwitz; see esp. his long letter of 4 January 1820 (CL, 5:1–9).

3. “The Natural History of German Life,” in Selected Essays, 112.

4. As Blake puts it on Plate 7 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star” (BPP, 35); for a (rather breezy) discussion of face and person in modern literature and psychoanalysis, see Johnson, Persons and Things, esp. 94–105 and 189–197.

5. On this issue, see Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers, 322–332 and 532–545.

6. Ratzinger, “Retrieving the Tradition,” 442, 444. Levinas stresses the infinity that such a model implies by pointing out how, when understood as relationality, “truth . . . does not undo ‘distance,’ does not result in the union of the knower and the known, does not issue in totality” (TI, 60).

7. Ratzinger, “Retrieving the Tradition,” 449–450. Ratzinger’s central claim that “the human person is the event or being of relativity” (452) stands in close proximity to Levinas’s claim that “there can be no ‘knowledge’ of God separated from relations with men. The Other is the very locus of metaphysical truth, and is indispensable for my relation with God” (TI, 78).

8. Ratzinger, “Retrieving the Tradition,” 446; Ratzinger here references St. Augustine’s commentary on John 7:16 (“Jesus answered them, and said: My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me.” Vulgate: respondit eis Iesus et dixit mea doctrina non est mea sed eius qui misit me [Tractate 29, Ch. 7]), where Augustine resolves the apparent contradiction by arguing that the “mission” is the person and, thus, is never owned or (in Christ’s case) indifferently performed by a person who takes himself to have independent and autonomous reality and standing: “it seems to me that the Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘My doctrine is not mine,’ meaning the same thing as if He said, ‘I am not from myself.’” See also De Trinitate, Book 4, Chapter 29, where Augustine expressly states that in the divine missions “sender and sent are one” (et qui misit et qui missus est unum sunt).

9. Nancy, Inoperative Community, xxxviii.

10. OM, 180–181. In striking anticipation of Newman’s critique of “private judgment,” Coleridge had already flagged the intellectual and institutional costs of radically fideist models: “where Private Interpretation is every thing and the Church nothing—there the Mystery of Original Sin will be either rejected, or evaded, or perverted into the monstrous fiction of Hereditary Sin, Guilt inherited; in the Mystery of Redemption metaphors will be obtruded for the reality; and in the mysterious Appurtenants and Symbols of Redemption (Regeneration, Grace, the Eucharist, and Spiritual Communion) the realities will be evaporated into metaphors” (AR, 297–298).

11. For a different argument that views modern rights not only as commensurable with but as originating in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, see Wolterstorff, Justice, esp. 19–131.

12. On Anselm’s ontological proof, its detractors, and the history of its reception, see Murdoch, Metaphysics, 391–430; still a strong account of this issue is Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:186–208. Murdoch quotes Simone Weil who, remarking on the distinctive status of this type of proof, observes that “for everything which concerns absolute good and our contact with it, the proof by perfection (wrongly called ontological) is not only valid, but the only proof which is valid. It is instantly implied by the notion of good” (quoted in Murdoch, Metaphysics, 401).

13. OM, 94; as Crosby points out, conscience—if understood as “the inner sanctuary of the human person”—cannot be yet another intentional object: “How would this inwardness of self-determination be possible if I had to do with myself only as with an object, if I were for myself nothing but another object on which I acted volitionally? . . . When conscience stirs and the inwardness of conscience opens up in us, we subjectively experience our standing in ourselves and our incommunicability” (Selfhood, 89–90).

14. Crosby, Selfhood, 84.

15. “When I name my memory, understanding, and will, each name refers to a single thing, and yet each of these single names is the product of all three” (ADT, 4.30). Taking a more skeptical view of Newman’s account of conscience, John Milbank faults the late Grammar of Assent for retreating from the proto-phenomenological account of its opening four chapters into “more extrincisist arguments for which the fact of conscience supports a strongly probabilistic inference as to God’s existence.” On Milbank’s reading, Newman’s “modern deontological system of conscience is simply one limited and perhaps dubious notional system” and, as such, seems at odds with Newman’s “illative sense,” a variant of Aristotelian phronēsis that “involves a constant reading of the world and not simply a listening to an inner voice” (“What is Living and What is Dead,” 50–51).

16. CL, 4:791–792. Elsewhere, Coleridge notes how “the philosopher of Königsberg and his first disciple and rival, Fichte, have erred and verged towards enthusiasm in their confusion of . . . the eunöya with the Hedone, the desirable of the intellect with the desirable of the body, and the exclusion of both indifferently from the permanent objects of the rational Will” (OM, 47n).

17. Gregory, “That I may be here,” 192.

18. Metaphysics, 301, 260; Murdoch pursues her critique of Wittgenstein by noting that “we ‘interpret’ our surroundings all the time, enjoying as it were a multiple grasp of their texture and significance. We are doing it continuously and this includes intense imaginative introspection, evaluation, focusing upon an image, turning thoughts into things” (ibid., 279). While her main claim remains sound, it is less obvious whether it is fair (or, for that matter, necessary) to stage it as a critique of Wittgenstein. On Murdoch’s reading of Wittgenstein, see Antonaccio and Schweiker, eds., Iris Murdoch, esp. the essays by Diamond and Antonaccio, and Broackes, ed., Iris Murdoch, esp. the sharply critical essay by Moran.

19. Gregory, “That I may be here,” 196.

20. On the later Coleridge’s theory of conscience, see Gregory, “That I may be there”; and Rule, Coleridge and Newman, 41–64; Rule rightly notes “the fundamental but ultimately secondary importance of the will” (48) vis-à-vis conscience, a point that emerges quite forcefully in Coleridge’s open endorsement of Luther (OM, 102).

21. As Coleridge remarks elsewhere, “A male & a female Tyger is neither more or less whether you suppose them only existing in their appropriate wilderness, or whether you suppose a thousand Pairs. But Man is truly altered by the co-existence of other men; his faculties cannot be developed in himself alone, & only by himself” (CL, 2:1197).

22. Murdoch, Sovereignty, 36, 60–61.

23. Pensées, no. 110, p. 28.

24. “The Tamworth Reading Room,” in Discussions and Arguments, 294; on the intrinsic aporias of modernity’s fact/value antithesis and its problematic application to “modern moral philosophy,” see MacIntyre, AV, 51–108. Newman’s late project of a comprehensive phenomenology of faith and knowledge and the various intermediate forms of “implicit reason” (a notion already advanced in his Oxford University Sermons) is substantially consistent with, indeed the most compelling extension of Coleridge’s neo-Platonist argument for a “responsible will” and the implicit proof of God by the phenomenon of conscience. Even before completing his Grammar of Assent (1870), Newman had made strikingly cognate arguments in an unpublished essay, “Proof of Theism” (reprinted in Boekraad, Argument from Conscience, 103–125).

25. Key here is the B-text of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, especially the so-called “transcendental deduction” (§§24–25): “in the synthetic original unity of apperception, I am not conscious of myself as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but am conscious only that I am . . . Hence although my own existence is not appearance (still less mere illusion), determination of my existence can occur only in conformity with the form of the inner sense and according to the particular way in which the manifold that I combine is given in inner intuition. Accordingly I have no cognition of myself as I am but merely cognition of how I appear to myself. Hence consciousness of oneself is far from being a cognition of oneself . . .” (B 158; Critique of Pure Reason, 195–196). The specific problem with self-reference and self-awareness, which culminates in the Deduction, has attracted an unusual amount of attention. For major arguments, see Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Ger. 1928); Ulrich Pothast, Über einige Fragen der Selbstbeziehung (1971); Manfred Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Subjektivität (1986); and Pinkard, German Philosophy, 26–40. As Manfred Frank has argued elsewhere, Novalis and Hölderlin—responding more to Fichte than to Kant—had clearly recognized the impossibility of premising a coherent self on a model of self-reflection; see Frank, Einführung, esp. 248–286 and Pfau, Romantic Moods, esp. 33–52.

26. Critique of Pure Reason A 738/B 766: Die Vernunft muß sich in allen ihren Unternehmungen der Kritik unterwerfen. . . . Auf dieser Freiheit beruht sogar die Existenz der Vernunft.

27. Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 25, 31.

28. Ibid., 49, 55; for Cutsinger, Coleridge’s relationship to Kant, though often one of convergence, ultimately remains agonistic, and he insists that “the reason Kant could never have been a Platonist, and therefore a Coleridgean, was that he remained subject despite his sense of mental power, to the patterns and assumptions of a strictly Newtonian universe of mechanistic materialism” (Transformed Vision, 51).

29. Homing in on the tension between “certainty” and “certitude” in his Grammar of Assent, Newman follows Coleridge by arguing that the very act of affirming a proposition or conception presupposes an inner state of self-awareness: “what to one intellect is a proof is not so to another, and . . . the certainty of a proposition does properly consist in the certitude of the mind which contemplates it” (281).

30. Newman, who in a late letter (17 August 1884) claimed never to have read a word of Coleridge was clearly misremembering. Perhaps as a result of Coleridge’s death on 25 July 1834, Newman in early 1835 began to study On the Constitution of Church and State and Aids to Reflection, as evidenced by his diary entry of 29 March 1835 in which he finds himself “surprised how much I thought mine, is to be found there” (qtd. in AR, cxxxvii); on Coleridge’s significant impact on the Oxford Movement, see Beer’s Introduction to AR (esp. cxxxvii–cxxxix), Boekstraad, Argument from Conscience, 29–31; Ker, John Henry Newman, 173–174; Rule, Coleridge and Newman, 25–40; Pattison, though aware of Newman’s reading of Coleridge (and late denial of that fact), nonetheless argues that “on close examination, the apparent fellowship of Coleridge and Newman is illusory” (Great Dissent, 42).

31. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 242.

32. On the work’s strange textual evolution, see Wright, Coleridge and the Anglican Church, 146–158.

33. See Ball, Science of Aspects, esp. 4–102 (on Ruskin); on Hopkins’s concept of objective vision and his resulting theory of inscape, see Ward, World as Word, 158–197, and Sobolev, Split World, 27–112; on Hopkins in relation to the visual arts, see Phillips, Gerard Manley Hopkins, esp. 41–86 and 245–263. See also Pfau, “Rethinking the Image.”