My Dream – History of Scotus, deranged as a youth / imagining himself in the Land of Logic, lying on the Road & in the Road to the Kingdom of Truth, falls into a criminal Intercourse with a Girl, who is in Love with him, whom he considers as the Daughter of the King of the Land / – impersonation & absolute Incarnation of the most Abstract -. Detected he defends himself on this ground. O it was a wild dream, yet a deal of true psychological Feeling at the bottom of it... (CN, I, 1824)
This book is about Coleridge’s informal philosophical adventures. Informal in the sense that their systematic presentation was never completed, and also in the sense that their psychological satisfactions are palpable and approachable not exclusive and remote. If we become familiar with the predominantly German philosophical idiom in which they appear, then their adventurousness merits the racy tale told in the Coleridgean epigraph above. As this cryptic, early Notebook entry suggests, the story of Coleridge’s philosophical connections was always going to be complicated and compromised. Spontaneously his intellectual biography assumes dramatic form, staged vicariously through the dream of another logician, Duns Scotus. The contemporary master-trope of philosophical dispute in Coleridge’s time was Pantheism. Truth, as Schelling’s major opponent in the revived quarrel over Pantheism, Jacobi, maintained, need not, perhaps should not, be gained philosophically. If that is so, then philosophy can be accused of a sort of intellectual dalliance, at best distracting from true seriousness, at worst a ‘criminal’ pleasure. A defence of philosophical activity, though, lies in Scotus’ claim that such intercourse is in any case of such a degree of abstraction that its otherwise scandalous desire may actually coincide with an ultimate mission to understand the final things. After all, ‘impersonation & absolute Incarnation’ describes accurately Schelling’s alternative to jacobi’s theology: a God of becoming, one whose self-production in shapes proportionate to human faculties of apprehension is what renders him a personal God, in line with the demands of Christian dogma.
I will frequently, however, try to avoid explaining Coleridge’s philosophical adventures by attributing to him a partisan position within the repeatedly reviving Pantheismusstreit, which Coleridgeans mostly know from McFarland’s classic if engagé account.1 Instead, I will concentrate on the eroticism of Coleridge’s philosophical engagements, if you like; the sheer overwhelming pleasure the man obviously took in surfing the waves of German idealism and post-Kantianism that followed each other in close succession. A book taking this approach is not going to be zealous in uncovering exact sources, preferring to look for the amplification by each other of Coleridgean and German philosophical views and ideas. Coleridge’s sympathies and antipathies towards certain philosophical positions are not always extricable from each other, as the guilty entanglement above suggests.
Especially significant here, for example, is the fact that, within the bounds of the Pantheismusstreit, Schelling’s response to Jacobi is both theologically aggressive and insistent on the importance of philosophy. Against his opponents, Schelling claims that philosophical inquiry is required for the adequate articulation of any theology worth considering. (In the philosophical terminology of the time, this amounts to saying that it must be possible to have a system of freedom, in which God’s alterity is nevertheless connected to Reason.) It is a short step from this to see philosophy as self-sufficient, capable of sketching unaided the shape of ultimate explanation or of schematizing the limits of what it is sensible to say. In the commonly accepted interpretations of the dispute, the autonomy of philosophy from theology, the fact that it could say all it wanted to without theological assistance, incriminated it The echoes of the Atheismusstreit that had removed Fichte from his Chair at Jena, defeated professionally by the amateur Jacobi, must have constantly encouraged Schelling to translate his grounding of Absolute philosophical justification into theological terminology.
But it is also true to say that the absorption of theological speculation by contemporary philosophical ontology endowed philosophy with all the passion and psychological investment normally associated with religion. Scotus’ infatuation was due to the degree of abstraction made erotically available through its personal response to him. Not the girl but the fact that she might be the daughter of the King of Logic attracts him. To do so, she must displace desire from its usual object, excusing the philosopher’s lust by having it symbolize the bodily, affective relationship that takes over when we become intimate with the generative sources of logic or philosophy – so becoming both the most material and least objective of objects of desire. Our postmodern age is comparably interested in the mobility of affect, or, following modernist Dinggedichte, the possible superiority of representation to original as a source of vividness or a standard of intensity. The Romantic philosophers after Kant rather understood the necessity of representation to symbolize, as in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’, an ultimate grounding exceeding representation and so only graspable through affect rather than knowledge. And Coleridge was one of that post-Kantian company, involved in the controversies of just what was to count as a legitimate exercise in ontological disclosure and what was not. In Wordsworth’s case, Coleridge always seemed to think that the jury was still out.
Writing to T.S. Eliot at a time when he was finishing his own book on Coleridge, I.A. Richards told the poet that he had found what he wanted in Coleridge but that he’d had to use a fair amount of coercion. Richards’ book was a critically epochal discussion that moderated major critical debates of his time. Mine cannot claim that importance; but it does try in its more modest way to use Coleridge in a comparably instrumental manner as the point of many departures and returns, and looks for the same tolerance or latitude from the reader. First it sets Coleridge’s mode of thinking within a German Romantic philosophical context as the place where his ideas can naturally extend themselves, stretch and find speculations with which to compare themselves. Secondly, it argues and it is hoped wins converts to the idea that Coleridge found philosophical speculation in the dominant idiom of his times exciting, vertiginous and as imaginatively engaging as poetry. We are accustomed to looking for the philosophical possibilities in poetry, encouraged by that overriding ambition of writing a philosophical poem shared by Coleridge and Wordsworth. But the siren power of philosophical writing, its indigenous challenge to our responsive readerly constitution perhaps gets underestimated or taken for granted in the Romantic rush to find in poetry the measure of everything. Philosophy for Coleridge had to be already engrossing for its poetic absorption to be so important an aim. ‘Not only the poet but also the philosopher has his raptures (Entzückungen)’ wrote Schelling in The Ages of the World.2
Like most of us, if we could only admit it, Coleridge thought and wrote largely vicariously: that is, he needed the vehicle of another person’s system to carry the freight of his own originality. If there is anything original in this book, it is certainly thanks to Coleridge and the philosophers facilitating his own self-expression. Not for Coleridge the stark Blakean antithesis of creation of his own system or enslavement by another man’s. Coleridge, when times were fraught (most of the time) could express this dependency dramatically. ‘My nature requires another Nature for its support, & reposes only in another from the necessary Indigence of its being.3 But, in the philosophy of the time, this drama was being extracted from its pathology and given theoretical legitimacy. The notion that the creative act, however much it appeared to be individual, was actually collaborative, was developed in different directions. The Romantic construction of the unconscious (a performance once plausibly attributed to Biographia Literaria by Catherine Belsey) endowed original expression with an afterlife it could not have intended.4 The critical reception’s extension of significance beyond a piece of writing’s stated purpose, whether that statement be the author’s or the implication of the work’s genre, removed the writing from the jurisdiction of both. Nevertheless, new interpretations and the critical fecundity of great art across time still reflected favourably upon the artistic reserves of the maker. Neither subject nor object held sway here, since the ontology of the work partook equally of both. Meanings which were unconscious at the time of the work’s inception were revealed to the artist by his or her work, the object here taking priority. But these illuminations only made sense, only identified themselves, by illustrating things belonging to the prior initiative that produced the work. This dramatic interchange, in which an aesthetic work is always further realized by the efforts of others – vicariously – normalizes Coleridgean ‘Indigence’. Formulated at critical moments – in Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragment 116 and almost simultaneously at the crux of Schelling’s System of 1800, plundered by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria – this progressive dialectic of the unconscious unleashes the plurality of self-expression.
Drama also underwrites the fact that the critical elaboration of an original can take place in another idiom. Post-Kantianism did not consider that to reinterpret was necessarily to reduce the living spirit of something to the dead letter of exposition. The hard-won doctrine of aesthetic autonomy emerging from Kant’s third Critique and most memorably deployed by Friedrich Schiller would seem to endorse this isolation of the aesthetic ‘object’ from subsequent criticism of it. But post-Kantianism was a philosophical battleground in which the master himself was subjected to the logic of the vicarious, or the various ways in which his successors spoke through him or in his spirit. Coleridge agreed with Kant that ideas of reason were uncontainable within our understanding; but he followed those who transformed the regulative effect to which Kant restricted our apprehension of ideas into a sense of their progressiveness and productivity. Ideas embodied ‘an infinite power of semination’. Coleridge had to devise a new rhetorical term to pinpoint the permanent ideality so infinitely differentiated. He called it ‘tautegory’. Tautegory could be used to describe the expansion into many discourses, under the pressure of historical difference, of an Absolute truth originally only revealed in one discourse.5 Coleridge notoriously tried to shuttle between poetry and philosophy, theology and science, criticism, politics and just about everything else available. He would have agreed, surely, with Friedrich Schlegel that poetry’s inherently dramatic dimension gave the lead to other discourses to collaborate, join forces, amalgamate and help form the new mythology needed for intellection to be adequate to modern reality.6
Coleridge’s most comprehensive descriptors of this ambition were words like Logos, Logosophia, anti-babel, even ‘the last possible epic, The Fall of Jerusalem’.7 For Friedrich Schlegel and the Jena group of 1798-1800, ideas were ‘the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts’, but this drama was already recruiting a still wider cast.8 The ‘anti-babel’ is perhaps the most fruitful of Coleridge’s wish-list to pursue here. In the first paragraph of the ‘Transcendental Doctrine of Method’ of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant fascinatingly regarded the preceding ‘Doctrine of Elements’, or transcendental deduction of the conditions necessary for experience to be possible, as an ‘estimate (Vorrat) of the building materials’ required for the Babel of pure reason he had been critiquing. While we can think ‘the idea’ of such a totality, the materials at our disposal restrict us to building on ‘the plane of experience’ instead. More than this, though, ‘the confusion of languages that unavoidably divided the workers over the plan, and dispersed them throughout the world, [left] each to build on his own according to his design’.9 Coleridge’s notebook entry 3254, examined in Chapter 4, must ‘build’ on Kant’s metaphor. It was precisely this given idea of experience that the post-Kantians, starting with Fichte, wanted to understand progressively. They wanted to do this by breaking down the isolation of discursive disciplines from each other, and getting them to engage in dramatic dialogue. From Fichte onwards, ideas of production began to circumscribe those of representation. Kant had analysed the manifold necessary for cognition to work and the dialectical tractability of reality this functionality was obliged to assume. His successors studied the dynamic production of the former by the latter. Imprisoned as Kant thinks we are within representation, the ‘X’ outside representation must be, as he says, ‘nothing for us’.10 Their answer to this ban is to develop out of Kant’s other critiques of aesthetic and teleological judgement a productive rather than representational paradigm of correspondence. The consequent striving of cognition to get on terms with its own production energizes a drama present from Fichte ‘s Wissenschaftslehre (Science of Knowledge, versions from 1794 onwards) to Hegel’s 1806 Phenomenology.11 Between these two, more and more discursive resources are requisitioned for the task. The delegation or relay of purely philosophical authority matches that of the subject. For of course the subject must be still unconscious of what remains its potential, though a potential which, like SchlegeFs prophetic historian, we must think of as the productive future in our past. We only need to look at the exorbitant criteria Coleridge sets the unfortunate Wordsworth for the creation of the philosophical poem he thought he should have written instead of The Excursion to feel the exhilarating pressure of the post-Kantian idea to create a concerted but indeterminate discursive front in pursuit of ends of which it was evidently not fully conscious.12
If philosophy’s ultimate task is to explain not only how we represent the world, but how we think the production of those representations rather than others, then it has something close to a creation-myth on its hands. This can lead in many directions, not all of them doctrinal ones. For a Christian like Coleridge, though, theoretical discourses closest to a theodicy would feel the most benign. But while Coleridgean knowledge is, according to the famous climax of the first volume of Biographia Literaria, a finite repetition of ‘the infinite I AM’, this acceptance of being spoken is close to anxieties Coleridge was voicing before reading the Germans, anxieties heard louder after he had read them and published and re-published the mystery poems, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Christabel and ‘Kubla Khan’ in 1816-17. In the fourth of the Philosophical Lectures of 1819, Coleridge sets out an acceptable version of truth’s divine ventriloquism.
I know, intuitively know, that there is a power essential to my nature, and which is ‘I ought, I ought not, I should not’, and that voice is original and self-existent, not an echo of a prior voice (I mean the voice of prudential self-love) but the very source out of which self-love must flow. (PhL, I, 178)
This passage sounds uncharacteristically Fichtean in its reliance on conscience, but the use of ‘love’ to validate our ‘very source’ suggests Schelling’s moral psychology. The mystery poems, though, play through various ideas of repetition, and in their narratives the meaning of repetition ranges from the progressive domestication of an original dynamism in ‘Kubla Khan’ to the fear of an imposing instrumentalism evident in the other two. In ‘The Rime’, puzzling in its mixture of arbitrariness and moralizing, ‘an enigma in the form of an explanation’, repetition is the master-trope at all levels.13 However accepting and resigned the mariner’s homily at the end appears, he is nevertheless driven by the desire to re-tell his tale for his chosen audience, as forcefully as the dead crew of his ship had been possessed to man their stations again. Indeed, Anna Maria Cimitile has recently argued from a knowledgeably European theoretical perspective, that insofar as the poem’s central fantasy reflects upon itself in the poem it produces a spectral slavery.14 In the context of Coleridge’s post-Kantianism, the spectral quality of slavery in fact locates it in Coleridge’s deepest anxieties about the human power lovingly to accept its determination or vocation. Far from dematerializing slavery, the spectral aspect lets it stand for the most fundamental violation Coleridge could imagine – a savage perversion of that amiable dispensation normally allowing us to enjoy a self-determining human subjectivity in the act of representing its production of us. As Cimitile states simply: ‘Slavery is the absence of subjectivity’.15 That the poem appears unconscious of its indictment of the slave trade lets slavery figure for the post-Kantian philosopher the blighting of all past and future sources of human possibility.
‘Christabel’ also dramatizes the fear of being spoken by another, here presented as the unpleasant contraction of the individual, like a dove being clasped by a snake, the movement of their breathing indistinguishable. Geraldine, the snake, then substitutes for Christabel, the dove, and proves her success by engaging in an otherwise incestuous dalliance with Christabel’s father, Sir Leoline. The impossibly elfin child at the end spells out the implications. ‘Kubla Khan’ moves through a succession of re-enactments of an originally unfocused creative energy without reaching resolution. Coleridge’s three great mystery poems appear caught in a sceptical philosophical moment. Their trademark reflexrvity – the extent to which they are about their own production – is curiously dubious about its own achievement Their circularity, far from providing exemplary images of self-production, suggests the limitations of purely imaginative solutions and encourages a readership which will be culturally urbane enough to appreciate this progressive self-criticism. Certainly, this book argues in the next chapter, both Schelling on Dante and Hegel on scepticism help us fill out a picture of the reading skills Coleridge’s poems require. Such skill is above all historicist: the talent to detect the persistence of the past in the present, its creative repetitions constructed to a new finitude, and gesturing towards a future. Schelling’s fullest exposition of this historicism took place in his unpublished masterpiece The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) which remained in draft form after his death. Coleridge, as the editors of his Marginalia point out, would have heard of it because Schelling describes his essay Ueber die GoUheiten von Samothrace as a supplement to Die WeUaUer, and Coleridge read that.16 But Coleridge appears to find his own way of expressing the historicist possibilities for Schellingian philosophy after the Freedom essay and Schelling’s reworking of its main thought against Jacobi in the Denkmal a few years later. Coleridge calls the identity persisting through historical changes an ‘idea’; he thinks of the changes as ‘infinite semination’. The rhetorical figure capable of symbolizing such exchanges is a ‘tautegory’. The social class he invented to make the study of tautegory, or permanence in progression, its profession and something it embodied, was to be the ‘Clerisy’.
The following chapters try to make good these claims about Coleridge and the German philosophical context I use to explain each other.17 Inevitably boosted by supplements from marginalia, letters and notebooks, which the Bollingen edition of the Collected Coleridge makes so freely available, the book focuses on central prose texts by Coleridge – Biographia Literaria, The Friend, the Opus Maximum – and keeps re-examining some of the major poems along with Coleridge’s own conflicted analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’. These are the main areas of concentration. The first chapter writes Coleridge into the German philosophical background with some determination. Hegel is a neglected figure in Coleridgean studies. No wonder, since Coleridge only read a few pages of his work. But Hegel, especially in his Phenomenology, remains not only the foremost commentator on the speculations of his age, but makes out of that commentary his own philosophy. For Coleridge’s eclectic thinking to be out of the loop here would therefore be unusual. One of the benefits of the freedoms this book takes with a conventional history of ideas is to keep Coleridge in the Hegelian picture to which he evidently belongs.18 Coleridge’s philosophizing only comes fully alive within the ambit of that of his avant-garde German contemporaries. Coleridge’s favouring of Schelling only reveals its full force if we know about the intellectual quarrel between Schelling and Hegel. All Coleridge’s other intellectual borrowings and investments do not really set up an alternative theoretical establishment: but they do fuel his power to intervene in the dominant philosophical idiom of the time.
Schelling, though, was the post-Kantian philosopher of dynamic productivity most congenial to Coleridge. The explanation of the two imaginations and fancy central to Biographia Literaria lose their main philosophical force unless they are referred back to Schelling’s ontological explanation of the world as the doubling and repetition in differentiated form of an original identity. After Biographia Literaria, Coleridge began disparaging Schelling in earnest, especially the scheme of Schelling’s Freedom essay which was the published culmination of Schelling’s philosophy up to that date (1809) and the basis of its further development in unpublished seminars, written drafts and lectures for the next 45 years. As Raimonda Modiano points out, Coleridge’s letters to J.H. Green distancing himself from Schelling seem founded on a reading of the much earlier Einleitung of 1799. He also seems to buy into Jacobi’s argument that Schelling perpetuates the elenchia – or what Modiano calls a ‘violation of hierarchical standards’ – of deducing a superior power from an inferior one.19 But it is the Freedom essay he admired that lies behind notebook entries such as the following.
In short, Schelling’s System and mine stand thus:- in the latter there are God and Chaos: and in the former an Absolute Somewhat, which is alternately both, the rapid leger de main shifting of which constitutes the delusive appearance of Poles ... ( CN, 4,4662)
Here, Schelling’s polar logic is an illusion; so is Schelling’s idea that God is grounded in an Unconscious prior to putting on his individuality, a reserve on which subsequent tautegorical repetitions draw. Coleridge, desiring more explicit revelation, thinks this leaves ‘all hanging in frivolous & idle sort. Schwebend.’ ((2V, 4,4664)
This seems pretty clear-cut. Coleridge Christianizes Schelling’s ontology, replacing its logic with doctrine. Two considerations should give us pause though. Firstly, as just noted, Coleridge was always fascinated in his poetry by images of how productivity could go wrong, those scenarios of instrumentalism from which we needed Christian virtue to rescue us. In other words, he appears to look for ways of describing how we can seek the chaos behind benign creativity, as if we could choose from it another creative purpose, one enslaving others to its selfish interest. Secondly, Coleridge’s use of tautegory, and (as we shall see) Schelling’s later appropriation of it, show him continuing to practise Schelling’s ‘leger de main’ in ways Schelling recognized and appreciated.
Coleridge, here as elsewhere, participates in post-Kantianism so as to return it constantly to the issue of expression. His early dramatic writings are already part of a project in line with his philosophical interests. When the philosophy begins to enlist different discourses in the service of new standards of theoretical adequacy, it translates the earlier sense of dramatic interplay into its own idiom. Chapter 3, ‘Drama as the Motor of Romantic Theory’, examines how this happens. Dramatic philosophy takes place in a setting traditionally thought hostile to drama because of the typically Romantic habit of introspection. In fact, post-Kantian theory brings the two together, and the dialogic quality of self-understanding, an idea going back to Shaftesbury, is explored. The self, eluding conclusive representation, is more like a play we produce than a single character. This insight connects with the larger post-Kantian strategies for dealing with questions of ontology.
The next chapter, ‘Coleridge’s Stamina’, examines Coleridge’s central metaphor for die ‘ideas’ with which his writing – poetical, philosophical, political – strove to get on terms. Usually, ‘ideas’ are tied exclusively to such locutions of Coleridge and Goethe as ‘the translucence of the general / universal in the particular / individual’. The strains this claim for representation puts on its symbolism are evident, and the claims of symbol have been conspicuously critiqued in twentieth-century theory from Walter Benjamin to Paul de Man. I reconsider that critique and argue that it must not be allowed to let the productive, historicist dimension contrived for symbol by Coleridge and Schelling to be effaced. Then, in Chapter 5, Coleridge’s literary autobiography, Coleridge’s ‘Coleridge’, is read as a case study of Coleridge’s power to evoke the production of a self and to use it as a model for philosophical understanding. His autobiography is presented as a biography, as a Biographia, and that impersonality along with the writing’s dramatic exercises in vicarious expression are again argued to connect fruitfully with the complexities of the post-Kantian critique of representation generally.
Around the time he published Biographia Literaria, Coleridge also projects his ‘rifacciamento’ or re-making of The Friend. This endeavour is far more than the 1818 revival of the periodical of a decade earlier. In renewing his idea of philosophical friendship, Coleridge’s plot appears to be, overall, to explore the role of affect in philosophical explanation. His admiration for and distrust of Kant’s alleged Stoicism, already a topic in my earlier chapters, is clarified through Coleridge’s stipulation of relationship and communication as fundamental requirements of the concept of truth. There is a helpful conjuncture here with recent postmodern discussions of friendship as the politics for an age in which politics appears in need of rehabilitation.
How contemporary are Coleridge’s philosophical concerns? Occasionally, I find it necessary and easy to slip into the idiom of modern and postmodern thinkers and their areas of interest (Heidegger and Wittgenstein on ontology, Derrida on friendship, Deleuze on Stoicism). The penultimate chapter, ‘Reading from the Inside’, looks both at the details of Coleridge’s construction of ‘tautegory’ and at its transmission through different critical reading practices and theory to the present day. While reading from inside an obligatory conceptual framework, European philosophy has always felt the need to address our sense of these boundaries, and the kind of delegations of its own authority it has to make to other discourses in order to evoke what for a monologic philosophy, bound to the task of explaining the logic of representation, must, as we heard Kant say earlier, remain ‘nothing for us’.
Many, though, have suspected this degree of philosophical inclusiveness and generosity as it appeared in Schelling. Friedrich Engels, a member of the audience of Schelling’s late Berlin lectures, found him to be all things to all people. ‘Protean’ is another ambiguous adjective to have been applied. Karl Jaspers pointed out, more sympathetically, Schelling’s trick of gesturing as much outside his current system as making his present one cohere from within. Schelling is currently in vogue. Two recent, indeed overlapping, books on the ‘new’ Schelling – new as in the ‘new’ Nietzsche, Bergson and Sartre – indicate an intensity of interest which builds on a continuous revival from Heidegger onwards.20 Evident is a willingness to discount Schelling’s apparent mysticism in the interests of foregrounding something else: the discursive mix it takes – aesthetic, ethical, mythological, psychoanalytical, theological – to make that existential apprehension, discovered by philosophy but beyond its powers of expression, remain credible. Coleridge in his way began the work needing to be done here, with his ideas about tautegory.
Hegel, arguably, is always new. Certainly the episode of the Phenomenology that his critics use to try to explode his system changes over time. Postmodern thinkers like Deleuze elaborate a Stoic resistance to conceptual principle intended to go beyond Hegel’s power to control. For Alexandre Kojève and his existentialist followers it had been the master/slave episode which they had tried to elaborate unmanageably. Otherwise a totalizing Hegel, intolerant of the individual’s right to resist generalization, supervenes. But still more recently, re-appraisals like Gillian Rose’s have theorized more persuasively the saving gaps and theoretical openings in Hegel’s logic so as to recover a truly speculative Hegel. Hegel’s self-departures from his own system, it is argued, can be attributed to him. It is the peculiar nature of the speculative proposition, formally postulated but never investigated across different discourses, that allows Hegel to take credit for the speculative provisionality his critics have otherwise opposed to his system. Hegel, while writing across many historical discourses in the Phenomenology, is reticent (and restricted to formal investigation in the Science of Logic) about the implications for philosophical expression of such speculation. Again, as with Schelling, this leaves work to be done which Coleridge, with his inveterate recourse to discussions of language, helps inaugurate.
The final chapter looks at Coleridge’s mode of addressing the speculative problem at its broadest, using Schelling, Hegel and Wordsworth as the most helpful points of orientation. Coleridge’s conclusion that ‘our modern philosophy is spelling throughout’ competes with the virtuosity of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ when it tries to make poetry adequate to the task of describing us Absolutely. In its approach to the poetic challenge, philosophy, to use current analytic terminology, can be either foundational or anti-foundational: it can claim a privileged grounding in truth or it can be willing to delegate its authority in order to make possible the evocation of what philosophy can uniquely think but not express. In the latter mode it can concede to other ways of writing the function of ascertaining an Absolute that by definition exceeds the powers of its own discernment. It can live vicariously. Poetry, when epistemological on its own account, can only be foundational.21 When does one hear of poets opting for the strategically prosaic in order to get across an especially poetic felicity? Coleridge worries that a foundational poetic contact with what we Absolutely are, necessarily immediate, would render such ultimate authenticity as a sort of nonsense, epitomized by Wordsworth’s ‘child Philosopher’ of the ‘Immortality Ode’. ‘What we call knowledge’, wrote Schelling in the ‘Introduction’ to the third draft of the Weltalter, is ‘more of a striving toward knowledge than knowledge itself’. Like Wordsworth in his famous remarks to Isabella Fenwick on the ‘Ode’, he described ‘anamnesis’ as the goal producing this philosophical quest to get behind itself. Coleridge worries that Wordsworth’s own poetic striving towards the same Platonic goal takes the immediacy of its own poetic success to be a sign of immediate episte-mological success – what Tim Milnes calls ‘a philosophy-transcending “poetic” truth’.22
Another way of putting this, Hegel’s way, is to say that immediacy, under analysis, empties itself of the particular ‘here and now’ supposed to demonstrate its certainty. It becomes uniform and universal in its range of reference. It is always the same because our guarantee of its truth is that it has no need of mediating characteristics which might distinguish its examples and occasions. Intriguingly, though, Schelling launched an attack on Hegel’s entire system on much the same grounds. There is, Schelling argued in his Lectures on Modern Philosophy, a sameness about the presence of the Absolute at each stage of Hegel’s Phenomenology, a common principle of contradiction rather than a something new each time on analogy with the continual development of a personality out of an unconscious past. Schelling here is seeking to use the philosophical nuclear option of the time against Hegel, the accusation of Pantheism. God in everything means that everything, theologically, is the same. Particular differences go by the board, as a truth for which mediation is irrelevant is therefore allowed to shine through all things in equal measure. This is extremely close to Coleridge’s attack on Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’. Pantheism does not let us make sense of the world.
The speculative Hegel has his own means of escaping this attack. Wordsworth’s defence, or the best one that we can find for him, is to attack: to defeat philosophical objection with the winning sufficiency of his poetry. Schelling and Coleridge could argue that Wordsworth’s bid for universal authority just looks eccentric. His ‘Ode’ retains the particular, idiomatic character which it was its Absolute project to shed. Wordsworth would do better to charge our ordinary usage with the numinous than devise unbelievable characters and scenarios. Adorno commended a language that in its descriptions could be simultaneously ‘identical and non-identical’. Resuming the post-Kantian tradition, he argued that ‘through the deity, language is transformed from tautology to language’.23 After Nietzsche, after theology, he must have thought, we are still left with the burden of maintaining non-identity if language is to flourish. To avoid tautology, our language has to cultivate in us, as Coleridge wanted it to do, the power to respond to historical change without slavish acquiescence in the prescriptions of civilization we have inherited. Our ‘cultivation’ is the central mission of the Clerisy in Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each (1830). But to opt out of identity altogether, certain of our unaided, immediate poetic grasp of ourselves outside the limitations of identity, won’t do either. We cannot disport ourselves with Wordsworth’s poetic children in some utterly liminal landscape without hypostatizing in effect another identity, an impossibly Absolute one.
So, finally, has Coleridge won and Wordsworth lost? The answer offered by the post-Kantian thinking this book studies is that this contest is actually a collaboration. Both sides are part of a movement in which, over time, as Schlegel and others argued, both can vacate their original positions for new, more composite forms of speech. Wordsworth’s poetry can tell us of our unquenchable and self-defeating desires for our immediate reconciliation with our destiny. Coleridge’s philosophy heightens our sense of the impossibility of such a vocation and the strangely indefensible intellectual postures to which it drives us. Wordsworth’s poetry can then rid us of this feeling of being ridiculous by its unanswerable exhibition of a need and longing which, he persuades us, we do indeed experience. Coleridge questions the credentials of that experience to call itself experience, and Wordsworth finds for those doubts an existential expression. And so the process continues, tautegori-cally rather than tautologically, the same only different each time. Poetry and philosophy are each other’s extension. They are on the stage, at the same time, in dramatic dialogue. The reader of both is the winner.