Chapter Four

Coleridge’s Stamina

Dissemination and Repetition

Coleridge remains English literary history’s most instinctive intellectual. The advantages of this position ought to be self-evident. In a culture, however, which of all European cultures has remained the most distrustful of theory, Coleridge’s distinction incriminates him. His chequered publishing history, full of missed appointments, unacknowledged appropriations and failed promises, is often connected with his intellectualism: his inveterate habits of reflection and his metaphysical fascinations live so far from the practical pleasures of the English empiricism against which he rebelled. Had not theory, in any case, been persuasively associated, since Swift and Pope, with an experimental licence at odds with literary humanism?1 This prejudice replaced Dryden’s easy bestriding of two ‘royal’ cultures, monarchy and the ‘Royal Society’, in ‘Annus Mirabilis’. ‘We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance’, wrote Dr Johnson reproachfully in his biography of one of England’s most radical poets.2 Theory as a sign of the dissociated sensibility, reliant on the accidental and neglectful of the essential, was a premise of Burke’s polemics against speculators and projectors in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Did Coleridge himself not join Burke’s side when he conceded, after all, that ‘abstruse research’ had offered a means of denaturalizing himself? The place of this opinion within the drama of the poem, ‘Dejection: An Ode’, in which it appears, is arguably to diagnose the distortions of a temperament which uses abstraction in that way, not to attack abstraction as such. Neil Vickers has argued in any case that if the ‘abstruse researches’ are biographically understood, they probably refer to Coleridge’s altruistic attempt to help his friend Tom Wedgwood alleviate a fatal nervous condition.3 These options, though, are forgotten in the simpler reading in which the poet agonizing over his forbidden love for Sara Hutchinson is made to confess that his intellectualism was a substitute for something better, something more psychologically indigenous, more generous, loving and creative.

The partial reading of ‘Dejection’, neglectful of its criticism of an unsustainable moment of self-consciousness, is supported by a stock portrait of Coleridge. In that familiar depiction, too abstract a mind, too speculative a sensibility, leave Coleridge playing the part of Hamlet in a play in which what is valued is achievement, grasp of reality and mature self-knowledge. This drama is allowed to override the dramas of Coleridge’s own thought. But in these dramas, such experiential, Leavisite values are absolutes relative to the various philosophical stories in which they feature. For Coleridge, self-knowledge was a vanishing-point, an ideal convergence never to be achieved. In any case, the reflection of a subject by its objective existence modelled for Coleridge the pattern of all creation, a paradigm that must remain mysterious. Self-knowledge in the fullest sense belonged to an Other into whose care Coleridge sought to consign himself with doctrinal Christian anxiety. The coincidence of Coleridge’s desperate desire for religious consolation with the contemporary form of ultimate philosophical enquiry accounts, I believe, for the unignorable affective power in Coleridgean speculation.

This dynamic, in turn, helps explain his stamina: the lasting attraction and intrigue of his ideas despite their highly variable output. Equally, though, Coleridge’s ‘stamina’ draws out the word’s other etymological options. (The stamen is the male seed-bearer of the flower, and also, metaphorically, the warp of a loom, an axis of textual production.) Despite his capriciousness, Coleridge undeniably wrote a massive amount, now collected in the magnificent new Bollingen edition. He was vastly and indiscriminately fertile. Furthermore, the basic unit of intellectual activity as he understood it figured his own kind of productivity. Ideas, for Coleridge, invoked an ‘infinite power of semination’. These mental stamina vitalized the many discourses his thought invaded. Once the mobile rather than fixed character of originality was conceded, then the exercise of intellect need not be defined by its conclusions, but could be recognized by its motility, its impulsiveness, its furthering of the principle behind what it had discovered. And, as (anglophone) appreciation of Coleridge’s German philosophical sources becomes more idiomatic, more a fluency in a way of thinking and less a search for sources, and as he becomes recognizably addicted to a common European Romantic habit of reflection, other corroborations of Coleridge’s intellectual manner appear.

From Kant to Hegel, philosophy repeatedly strives in dialectical fashion to identify ‘the rules of the IMAGINATION’ with the ‘powers of growth and production’ (BL II, 84). I. A. Richards’ favourite Coleridgean phrase in fact describes that crucial move which, in different ways, clinched the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Introspection turns out to require, with varying strength of prescription, an unconscious collaborative ground. Driven underground in this way, Leibniz’s ‘pre-established harmony’, guaranteeing the fastening of our ideas upon a corresponding world, can become a troubling affiliation. It can, certainly, continue its underwriting of enlightenment or the validity of knowledge; it can also become more like an alarming return upon our spiritual selves of apparently alien material. A world instinct with spirit can reconcile subject and object with consoling or with spectral forms. Ambiguous in this way, the ‘companionable form’ introspected in the film of flame of ‘Frost at Midnight’ portends an absent stranger. I.A. Richards need not have seen himself as a materialist sympathizing with Coleridge’s opposite idealism if idealism of Coleridge’s kind could only make sense of itself as the production of a like-minded but absent (as it were) material world. As suggested, the materialisms of Leibniz’s successors vary. Fichte’s ‘not-I’, without which each act of self-consciousness would have nothing to discriminate itself from, is itself negated in the objectivity of Hegelian ‘reason’. Hegelian reason’s progress is finished only when its power to be commensurable with reality has turned into the power to be commensurate with itself (not-I again becoming I in an entirely universal sense). Just as strongly, though, the post-Kantian most influential upon Coleridge, Schelling, resists the notion of such ultimate programming, and retains the sense of a fortuitous, voluntary coincidence between our own intellectual dispensation and something anterior to it. Coleridge’s predominantly Christian expression of this good fortune cannot obscure the historical moment in philosophical history that makes it possible for him to think in this way.

Eschewing the Hegelian goal of absolute self-transparency, the Schelling/ Coleridge moment is always open to mystery and obscurity. To be adequate, the presentation of what is lucid must be shadowed by what could have been different. The positive is haunted by an imponderable alternative. Coleridge’s Christianity has no monopoly on the theological idioms thus brought into play. Michael Rosen succinctly describes the movement from

an Absolute which is simultaneously self-revealingand self-concealing (Schelling’s doctrine) to a position in which the manifestation of transcendence is at most an interruption or hiatus in the course of the finite (as in Hōlderlin). Romantics, therefore, often seem to hover between affirmative and negative theology.4

Revealing by concealing and concealing by revealing foster a variety of entry points into the discourses with which we construct our world. Some of Coleridge’s poems, it is easy to claim, give us a version of Hōlderlin’s discourse of interruption. The person from Porlock figures as a scheduled not an arbitrary interference in communication. His interruption of the writing of ‘Kubla Khan’, within Coleridge’s calculated framing of the poem, authorizes its form and content. Formally it is a Romantic fragment poem; materially, it speaks a hiatus between the absolute authority to decree that something happens, and the condition of endless simulation to which we are bound when we envision that authenticity. According to the poem’s Preface, the poet’s immediate intimacy with his inspiration is interrupted and so turns into a task of reconstruction at second hand. But this is what the narrator of the poem does, and, on reflection, what Kubla has done with the natural forces at his disposal; the poem makes its arbitrariness into its own content. The truest version of what is, the poem says, is gained through revelation; but revelation is always an appearance, an epiphany, a mixed prophecy of good and ill. The poem does not say, in a postmodern formulation tempting to us now, that the real has been displaced by the greater solidity of our representations of it - although Coleridge famously evoked his experience of poetic possession with the claim that ‘the images rose up before him as things’. The real is still what assures our representations of their purchase on something. But this grasp evinces the sense of a willed tractability characteristic of our ‘real’, a sense of election, a sense by which our foundation in the world feels like a gift. It feels gratuitous, spontaneous, free, voluntary and accommodating because at other important levels of explanation it also is causeless, unwarranted and arbitrary. The mysteriousness of the poem’s fountain and its eponymous hero’s fiat mimes an ultimate inscrutability only got at through an uncertain repetition, through the wonderment that what is, is.

Epiphany, in our post-joycean take on it, reveals a certain world in contrast to a delusory one deprived of God’s ontological backing. It also implies that this revelation can make us know more painfully our frequent out-of-placedness, our lack of fit in the discovered world (like, say, the adolescent boy in Dubliners), our alienation from an environment that gives us our standards of welcome and reciprocity. The discovery that ‘Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her’ was surely the common ground of Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s temporary poetic collaboration? Yet, in Satanic or Byronic fashion, our incongruity can exploit a negative theology, as Rosen allows. Represented then is not an alternative to divine order, but the same order as it must extend beyond our reach into areas not constrained to fit our purposes. These inimical environments have been evacuated by the God who supports us, but perversely to explore them is to register still more of the Godhead, more of the possibilities he charitably did not adopt. The unassimilable too becomes the sacred or dreadful, the visionary, uncontrolled poet at the end of ‘Kubla Khan’: ‘For he on honeydew hath fed / And drunk the milk of Paradise’. In a familiar anthropological trope, the abjected achieves inviolable status. What makes it exceptionable also renders it exceptional – a type of the divine precisely by virtue of its alien character. With a shudder the community congratulates itself on being favoured by a God who has not taken this other road.

Clearly, this theology is far from being systematic. It may result in a perverse iconology; or it may produce paradoxes verging on the nonsensical (as, I will argue in the final chapter, Coleridge suspects happens in the case of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’). When one doesn’t take these liberties with it, this theology is also highly economical. Coleridge does not try uselessly and verbosely to describe what lies outside his own sphere of possibility. But he describes, as we shall see in more detail later, this inside as an inside. In its larger shapes, certainly, Coleridge would no doubt be keen to trace the outline of Christian dispensation. But in local detail, what the theology says is far more indiscriminate, something interchangeable even with ontology. Theology then tends to look like the personification of our exigencies when, deprived of a standpoint of scientific evaluation, we try to account for the fact that science works. We have languages in which to express the vocational character of our experience, and theology appears to add unnecessarily to or mythologize an expressiveness it should find adequate. Coleridge, by implication, applies Occam’s razor to theology most dramatically in his poetry. The symbiosis of Geraldine and Christabel, snake and dove entwined and univocal – that is to say equivocal because one has suborned the other – condenses an image of extraordinary compression, a conceptually unmanageable repetition. The nervousness of the poem’s Gothic, fragmentary expression maybe derives both from its arrogation to itself of theological sufficiency, and from the way that sufficiency reveals our fragile luck. What if the ‘Lord of thy utterance’ that you were obliged to repeat were a Geraldine?

But Coleridge conjures comparable effects, if much less conspicuously, in every other discourse or form of words he employs. His descriptive performances, when aptly closing on something, whether a pot of urine in his Notebooks, a landscape, a philosophy, a person, a historical event, seem powered by the conviction that to defamiliarize is theology enough. Primary imagination, as formulated in Biographia Literaria, is indeed primary here, but by virtue of being a repetition. Because it repeats an originally divine contraction – ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the infinite I AM’ – it can define what is absolute for us. To say our absolutes are relative is nonsense: how could they remain absolute? But it makes sense to say that precisely because they are relative to God shows that God has chosen them with us in mind. Remove the God-term, and, again, you are left with a repetition carrying the awareness that our differentiations float on an ontology that could have been mapped in other ways, although this ontology is only disclosed in the fact that this otherness did not happen, is not accessible. Kierkegaard’s thought can plausibly be viewed as an extended attempt to retain a uniquely theological explanation of this repetition; and the Christian Coleridge’s problem often seems to be that he naturally adopts philosophical explanations, structurally symmetrical, for which this religious affiliation is not strictly necessary. To perceive fully – to employ the ‘prime agent of human perception’, the Primary imagination – is by philosophical implication to affirm some absolute contraction from a range of other possibilities into the world we find so attuned to our senses. We grasp this congruence as if it were the declaration of another self, an infinite ‘I am’, to whose assertion of its individuality we can relate. We are sure of our world as if it were someone speaking to us. But when Coleridge’s theology is not systematically superimposed on this explanation, then the ‘as if is sufficient.

Awareness of the fact that this hypothetical mundane speech might have been couched in another epistemological language, one tailored to the capacities of another audience altogether, defamiliarizes the world and renews our nervousness or apprehensiveness of it. I prefer to call it ‘apprehensiveness’ (drawing on Charles Lamb’s positive response to Wordsworth’s poem, The Excursion: ‘how apprehensive! How imaginative! How religious! ‘5) to try to catch in one word the twin meanings of heightened consciousness of something and fearful awareness of the limitations this sharpened sense of outline lends. By definition, we can have nothing to say about the ineffable alternatives. The charged repetition we are left with is the staple of Kantian aesthetics, the philosophical tradition Coleridge and the post-Kantians developed in diverse directions. To some, this restriction of philosophical speculation to its own inside, aesthetically intensifying descriptions of what exists as a substitute for theological comparison, has looked impoverished. The fate of this art, as Jay Bernstein puts it, following Benjamin, is to induce a kind of mourning.6 We mourn the plenitude denied us, and this, redoubling our lament, is the only idea we can have of that fullness of which our experience is a part. Already in Coleridge’s time, though, aesthetic repetition was being unpacked to reveal more than the failure to signify something bigger. Schelling’s voluntarism, the Sehnsucht of his Absolute, would increasingly abandon this synecdochical understanding. On his view, it makes little sense to think with Schiller of the different person one might have been, if genuinely enfranchised by the aesthetic into a complete existence, as a complementary self, one of two halves making up a whole. For the Schelling of the Freedom essay, the very notion of a self would disappear or be annihilated in the merger contemplated. Or else its eccentricity in assuming its revolt against normality had absolute authority would be perverse and evil. If the emergence of human identity repeats Absolute self-definition, then the resulting exercise of human freedom has to be unconditioned. Hence arises the possibility of choosing not to repeat, the possibility of evil: the assertion of an absolute selfishness over and against the Absolute will. This paradox, like Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, opens avenues leading outside systematic neatness, but in existentially valid ways that Schelling welcomes. His Freedom essay, after all, is meant to establish the nature of human freedom.7 But Schelling is no legitimist, believing as a consequence that ‘Whatever is, is right’. His world, understood through its ages, its Weltalter, is evolving, historical through and through, and to be furthered in that involvement to the extent that we can intuit the meaning of its gift to us.8 Walter Benjamin characteristically developed the Jena departure from Kant of which Schelling’s Freedom essay was perhaps another delayed result. Outflanking the subject/object dichotomy, the defining progressiveness of the Jena artwork suggests, as we saw Schelling argue in his essay on Dante, a new ontology in which what an artwork is increases with each reception and reworking. This leads to a cognitive theory of art, one like Gadamer’s, where the aesthetic suggests new and different continuances by which something is brought into play without ever being objectified. The artwork, we might say, offers a benchmark for philosophical stamina.

Kantian contraception

The aesthetic of Kant’s third Critique, so rich a resource, may prefigure but never formulates these escapes from melancholy underachievement. The beautiful and the sublime survive our loss of cognitive interest through their power to produce pleasure. This feeling, scientifically inarticulate, describes an irreplaceable sense of wonder. More recently, Peter de Bolla has re-examined and elucidated the wonder in which aesthetic experience trades.9 Above all it is mute, leaving us with two options. Under the first option, we take its refusal of paraphrase or exposition to be an advantage, one tied to the irreplaceability of art which Coleridge believed in down to the order of words in a Shakespearean sentence. In Richard Wollheim’s formulation, ‘it is not clear that we have any other way of talking about the objects themselves. Or, to put the same point in non-linguistic terms, it is not always the case that things that we see as expressive, we can or could see in any other way’.10 If you want the feeling, you have to quote the lines, observe the painting, listen to the music. The particularity of aesthetic judgement insisted on by Kant, the paradox of these concrete universals, prevents us from ever being able sensibly to generalize about a work of art. The only generality produced is the universal agreement about each particular case. We can no more refer to the class of Hamlets than we can to the class of historical events, the class of Spanish Armadas, battles, economic slumps and so on. This is not because other Hamlets have not been written, nor because further Spanish Armadas have not taken place, but because they are not the sort of thing that can recur. You can’t repeat a historical event, and that unrepeatability is part of what is meant by its being historical. It happened then. Any repetition of the event must already be built into the event’s description, and the event’s typicality resolved once and for all in that original resonance. Dissemination is ruled out.

But Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel dissolve the artwork’s objective boundaries in the ever-changing generic field of its reception and, in Andrew Benjamin’s phrase, they go on to describe a ‘plural event’.11 Historical reinter-pretation allows the same event to develop more of itself across time in art and history. The Kantian prophylactic (if that it not too comic a way of developing the metaphor in play here) is discarded. Emerging from isolation, the aesthetic is allowed to breed, to demonstrate its autonomy and originality in its discursive fecundity. Coleridge called such repetition of sameness with a difference ‘tautegory’. He contrasted it with allegory, in which we see a resemblance to something in an entirely different subject Kant does not pursue this tautegorical notion of singularity persisting across time and so becoming different, while, like a changing person, remaining the same individual. Accordingly, his aesthetic has nothing more to say than its expressions of our sense of how we apprehend the world and, inseparable from this, our wonder that things should be so and our wonder at what else might be. This is to say that we pleasurably repeat, or sublimely fail not to reiterate, our experience. In either case, nothing more is said. Except that that is what the aesthetic as opposed to non-aesthetic description does say: that there is nothing more to be said. No scientific statement can get away with that finality or produce its pleasure.

The second option, faced with expressions of this aesthetic ‘mutism’ as de Bolla felicitously calls it, is to feel challenged to evolve a new vocabulary, to feel unlearned in the description of affect and keen to be better equipped to describe our feelings. Perhaps existing aesthetic vocabularies are underused: the influential division of aesthetic experience between the categories of the sublime and the beautiful has for too long appeared adequate? In a once well-known article, F. N. Sibley pointed out that in practice we already use a more comprehensive and variegated vocabulary of taste and aesthetic approval. He relies, one assumes, on the Austinian premise that ‘ordinary uses of words’ are the philosopher’s first resources, although, Austin conceded, ‘it seems that we shall in the end always be compelled to straighten them out to some extent’.12 Certainly the traditional sufficiency of the sublime and the beautiful has possibly made acceptable our otherwise culpable lack of practice in describing wonder. Or maybe we need to be still more inventive, to look for new or undervalued words, sleepers, awaiting aesthetic activation, potential but yet actual collaborators in our attempt to satisfy our need for aesthetic articulation? De Bolla cites I.A. Richards, whose interest both in ‘basic English’ and in ‘linguistic engineering’ is a byword for this kind of optimistic interventionism. We are to accept the distinctiveness of the aesthetic, but to feel provoked by it to be more discriminating. How else are we to engage in that activity inseparable from aesthetic appreciation – evaluation? It is all very well to assume a lapidary appositeness in aesthetic expression because Kant has proved that the aesthetic cannot be reduced to another discourse. But we still want to say that some art is better than other art, without falling into the nonsense of saying that they are two shots at doing the same thing. Michelangelo’s and Bernini’s ‘David’ can be educatively compared and evaluated precisely because we do not measure them on the same scale.

This second option does appear to approach the Schlegelian exit from or development of the first option. Kant’s insistence upon the particularity of aesthetic expression is opened up and given a future. Aesthetic experience, de Bolla writes, is something ‘lived through’, in analogy with the way that Barnett Newman literally cohabited with his ‘inaugural’ painting (Onement 1) before he could say what he’d done. Insofar as the artwork has a material existence, it is made up of our affect in response to it over time.13 This temporal dimension recovers the post-Kantian response to a central dilemma of Kantian aesthetics. As de Bolla points out, Kantian aesthetics is founded on a catachresis. Kantian catachresis, by which we call our aesthetic experiences objects, and refer to works of art and their qualities as if they were things, returns us once more to ‘mutism’ and linguistic poverty. For we do not appear to possess another way of describing the universality and necessity we wish to attribute to aesthetic experiences other than to call them objects, which they are not. The aesthetic content has no language of its own; its vicarious expression points to a native silence. When we say that the painting, the nocturne, the sky, her expression are beautiful, we solicit the same degree of agreement about our subjective feeling for these things as we more confidently expect of shared objective knowledge. The absence of any private, idiosyncratic content to the feeling of satisfaction delivered aesthetically means that aesthetic judgements are habitually expressed as if referring to objects not subjects. There is just not another way of putting their claim to legitimacy. To point out that aesthetic judgements are therefore figurative, expressing subjective response in objective likeness, and so themselves produce more of what they are about, repeats the dilemma of ‘mutism’.14 They never break out of their own hermeneutical circle. In Kant’s aesthetic, aesthetic expression is irreplaceably particular for the same reason that it defies analysis or expression in other terms.

In the end of his exposition of the connections beween ‘mutism’ and wonder, de Bolla is left with ‘dignity’, a very Kantian derivative. This dignity is not integrated with ‘grace’, as in Schiller’s treatise. Dignity, as de Bolla puts it, responds to the utter individuality of our fate, a destiny isolated both by its loneliness and in its inability to break through its limitations into another life. For Schiller, dignity considered on its own expresses the sublime attitude by which we accept, firstly, that we can never attain completion; secondly, that this realization of failure is the only way our ultimate vocation can appear to us.15 Again, the aesthetic circle is drawn tight. Characteristic of all accounts of the sublime from Longinus onwards has been its ‘turn’, whereby the apprehension of it replicates the same scenario of turning defeat into victory; or turning the failure to progress beyond physical constraints into the simultaneous expression of our grasp of the unconstrained.16 Sublimity demands sublime description, a reinforcement that is also a descriptive exercise in diminishing returns. The expressionism we are dealing with here, it could be said, becomes increasingly abstracted from everything else; hence, perhaps, that attraction towards the sublime typical of the painters, Newman and Rothko, whose work de Bolla writes about so revealingly in this context.

Schiller, though, already has his exposition of ‘grace’. The natural expression of a happier schöne Seele, grace is reserved for those times when we don’t want to stand entirely upon our dignity. But it is worth remembering that Hegel’s critique of the graceful life of the ‘beautiful soul’ raises problems akin to those belonging to the sublime attitude. Like the Stoic, the beautiful soul proposes moral self-cultivation as a solution to the intractability of the world to human purposes. The aesthetic invention where this self-perfection is made possible replaces worldly contingencies; it claims itself to be nature. But Hegel suspects this aesthetic resolution of the conflict between is and ought, what we should do and what we can do. He suspects it of recasting the conflict as the effort to connect our rational with our sensuous being, as ‘merely an insincere play of alternating these two determinations’ (... die verstellende Spiel der Abwechslung diese beide Bestimmungen).17 Hegel’s verstellende combines the sense of misplacing with that of playacting; he thus deprives Schiller’s fictional morality of any aesthetic excuse for having been made up. Hegel’s word for Schiller’s psychol-ogism is ‘abstraction’ (Abstraktion). When the particular aesthetic experience claims prescriptive universality it creates a self-serving nature abstracted from real nature: this is Hegel’s verdict on the inescapably figurai character of aesthetic objectivity; ‘it is now the law that exists for the sake of the self, not the self that exists for the sake of the law’.18 In a stand-off between virtue and ‘the way of the world’ (Weltlauf), the latter, thinks Hegel, will always prevail.19 For him the point is to discover the necessary (Reason) within and not at an abstract remove from contingent reality. When we internalize the world as a mixture of psychological aspects, and achieve a graceful harmony between it and all the other drives of our personality, the world reduces to a purely abstract expressionism.

To put it crudely, Hegel thinks that Schiller’s account of the resolution of ethical conflict, between what our reason tells us we ought to do and what the world lets us do, describes the restoration of a feel-good factor. Doing the right thing is equated with achieving psychological equilibrium. The insincerity, for Hegel, lies in pretending that such therapy exhausts the meaning of morality. The experience of aesthetic equilibrium may work wonders for us; it may make us better persons when we return to the real world; it won’t answer any questions asked in the real world. On a broadly Aristotelian view, it is true, morality doesn’t make sense if it is divorced from a notion of human flourishing. The aesthetic can certainly supply educative pictures of the good life. In this context, though, the sublime still has a part to play in emphasizing the compromises involved in the Aristotelian pursuit of human ends, or the accommodation of human desires to Greek notions of Fate. In his Poetics Aristole acknowledges that the ultimate therapeutic experience, catharsis, is gained through the purging of pity and fear. These are responses to the tragic exposition of humanity through its heroic failure to be happy or fortunate. The unacceptable is not made acceptable, but art shows that we reach our boundaries in contemplating the unacceptable, and that this experience satisfies us in a peculiarly comprehensive way.

Hegel thinks Schiller’s graceful aesthetic entertains a much diminished version of this dialectic. Taken outside the fatal conflict, his aesthetic harmony idealizes its competing forces, forgetting that one of those is contingent and beyond our control. Emptied of that content, the nature-drive (Naturtrieb) falsely internalizes a constitutionally external force. Of course, the progress of Hegel’s own philosophy is to seek an evolving rational pattern in our successive definitions of what is external to us. Unlike Schelling and Coleridge, he is not interested in tracking the reverberations of an ontology continually disclosed through our repeated historical differences from it Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’ ode does read like a Schillerian poem: ‘for in our life alone does Nature live.’ It just depends on how diagnostic one takes it to be. In deep depression, health may indeed appear like an impossible mastery over circumstances, an imaginative hegemony. ‘Hence viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, / Reality’s dark dream!’ Ultimately, though, all well-being depends upon something given to us, and on our power to accept and repeat it by means of our ‘shaping spirit of Imagination’; and that ‘dower’, the poem’s religious abjection makes clear, is as much out of our power to manufacture as is the grace of God. We have already seen his capitulation mime the crucial reversal in the plot of Hegel’s Phenomenology.

Finally the poem’s narrator imagines the reproduction of the joy he wishes in the ‘Lady’, in his ‘friend’. In that altruistic benediction he perhaps escapes the pathological desire for original production symptomatic of his depression. He accepts as sufficient the repetition implied when our animation of the world can be described as ‘guided from above’. But there is no other access to what is ‘above’ other than to follow its ‘guidance’, or to see in our limitations a vocation, a calling, rather than a thwarting. Repetition, the recurrence of the same in different historical form, tautegory rather than allegory, fits the Jena idea that the aesthetic typically encourages its own reproduction. The artwork precipitates a plural event allowing it to be revived in different shapes no longer necessarily observing original aesthetic allegiances. This self-destroying perpetuation is a way of knowing, not an aesthetic abstraction from knowing, not the alternative to cognition it would be in Kant’s and Schiller’s aesthetics. Coleridge’s narrator finds his well-being finally reflected back to him when re-imagined for someone else. Coleridge’s aesthetic maintains the sense that our creative perceptions are re-enactments, repetitions in different historical situations. The result is to defamiliarize what is described rather than to describe something else. There isn’t something else to describe.

Nevertheless, an aesthetic that continually historicizes itself in this way, existing in its departures from any original moment, clearly overcomes the ‘mutism’ inherent in Kantian aesthetics. It reworks the figurative quality, which seemed to entrap aesthetic judgement in its own content, as an openness to reformulation that abandons selfish interests. In the personal drama of ‘Dejection’, the care of the narrator’s self is bequeathed to the other. In aesthetic terms, the selfishness abandoned is disciplinary, as the aesthetic legacy becomes a general facility to defamiliarize through the sense that our apprehensiveness is triggered when we realize that perception repeats something we cannot get at in any other terms. Equally, the apparent failure to gain immediate acquaintance with the ‘infinite I AM’ takes the form of a continuing discovery of the common ground shared by all our repetitions of the ‘infinite I AM’. They may all be repetitions, rather than original grounding discourses, but they are all repeating the same thing. The lack of a foundational discourse, therefore, is also what powers Coleridge’s striking idea of philosophy as an ‘anti-Babel’. Failure to posit becomes exposition, informative in its own way.

The anti-Babel

Coleridge’s notebook entry where the ‘anti-babel’ appears describes how

Preparatory to the great anti-babel of metaphysical Science, all sorts of materials psychological & logical must be brought together / some fit. some unfit – and as even this takes ages even before the commencement of the building, the Fetchers & Carriers build Cots & Houses of them, each according to his own Fancy, with different cements – still however they are but orderly Cumuli of materials, that must surely be taken to pieces – some times 5 or 10 stones may be taken at once, unloosened – &c (CN 3, 3254)

There is a lot of activity in this building site. Fundamentally, Coleridge describes an assemblage of materials in need of breaking down before their common philosophical or metaphysical contribution can be gauged. Surely Coleridge cannot be unaware of the paradox of raising a great building to counter the hubris of the original tower of Babel? He had made the connection between building and language before in another cryptic entry about Kubla Khan: ‘Kublaikhan ordered letters to be invented for his people’ (CN 1. 1281). In Coleridge’s poem, Rubla’s ‘miracle of rare device’ is of course architectural. It repeats the original creativity of the ‘fountain’ from which the ‘sacred river’, Alph, ‘momently was forced’ from the ‘deep Romantic chasm’. Harnessed to cultivate the city, the river’s subsequent progress provides the setting for Kubla’s ‘pleasure dome’, where the noise of its past and future can mingle, an effect somehow linked with the perfect poise of the dome. Dependency on the river’s sacred passage, though, means that Kubla’s achievement can only generate further repetitions, and can never call a halt to these with its own authoritative, monumental statement. The invention of language is a comparably doomed display of control since it is confirmed by everyone else’s ability to use its words in their own way, in ways different from their donor. Language enfranchises rather than reduces a population; Coleridge, in Marjorie Levinson’s words, ‘makes his readers amass within them the amassing harmony’. But the alternative, as Levinson also points out, would be a cul-de-sac; the one that, I argued, Hegel criticized in Schiller’s schöne Seele; what Levinson calls ‘the appropriation of the actual and extrinsic into psychic space’.20 This repeats the presumption of Babel, not the originality that Babel originally presumed to emulate.

Coleridge discusses Babel at length in The Friend. The discussion appears in the tenth of the Essays on the Principles of Method, that are the principal adornment of the 1818 ‘rifacimento’ of the original periodical, ‘the first elements, or alphabet, of my whole system’.21 The context is Coleridge’s analysis of the intellectualism properly belonging to ideas rather than to fixed images or idols. Ideas cultivate, sensuous images civilize or lead to the architecture of civilization – cities, musical instruments, artifice generally, convenience. But this devotion to the ‘agreeable’ must, like Schiller’s schöne Seele’s devotion to the graceful’, have ‘assumed’ what it then ‘did not, in this respect, pretend to find’. In other words, even an apparently single-minded devotion to accessible pleasures is predicated upon an absolute provision revealing our situatedness in the world not just as convenient and timely but as a vocation. Forgetfulness of the contingency of the dispensation we enjoy leads to the abstraction which Coleridge thinks produces polytheism. Polytheism amounts to absolute claims for the facts of experience, claims that must appear a little ridiculous, ‘a whole bee-hive of natural Gods’. The trick here is to reverse the normal meanings of concrete and abstract. Usually we would think of the function subtending everything as an abstraction from their concrete variety. But in depicting an absolute that has temporarily contracted to be the ground of our determinations, all (determinate) concretions must seem abstract in contrast to its potential, undisclosed variety.

Coleridge marries this philosophical discussion to his interpretation of the first book of Genesis. Investment of particulars of our experience with absolute authority makes each impossibly presume to exclude the other. The confusion of tongues (repeated with a difference, Coleridge seems to suggest, in the productive ‘diversity’ of tongues now which, as a linguist, he enjoys) is the sign of this philosophical malfunction. Confusion, in Coleridge’s interpretation, appears to preclude translation, which in his work as a philosopher he habitually practises. Diverse translation, as opposed to absolute posturing, is the continual amassing of significance that expounds more of the variety of the original it repeats. Or, as Friedrich Schlegel might say, description in one genre stimulates description in another and adds progressively to our sense of the universal precipitating both. Schlegel’s way of putting this gets at Coleridge’s post-Kantian rather than Kantian character. Again, the thought is led by the Jena idea of an aesthetic willing to sacrifice the exclusive autonomous realm won for it by Kant’s third Critique.

Let us look at this distinction more closely, using a difficult but precise commentary by Werner Hamacher.22 Like Walter Benjamin before him, Hamacher understands Schlegel to claim a dynamic advance through a critique of Kant’s aesthetic isolationism as it survives in Fichte. We have already seen Coleridge’s robust objections to Fichte’s stoicism and its ‘perfect silence’. Fichte’s original insight, on Dieter Henrich’s famous reading, was to see the severe limitations imposed on the logic of reflection in any explanation of self-consciousness. In Kant, the ‘I think’ that must accompany any experience for it to be someone’s, and so be an experience by a subject of an object, always exceeds its own jurisdiction and so remains unexplained. For our self-recognition to work we must enjoy another kind of acquaintance with ourselves that is unreflective. Hamacher reverses Henrich, and claims that Fichte’s call to understand self-orientation through action – or knowing something by doing it – still relies on reflection for identifying the active self. Fichte’s claim to have both a reflective and a performative access to the ‘I’ becomes an ‘irreparable inconsistency’.23 Again, in Chapter 2 we have already looked at Schelling’s and Hegel’s different takes on Fichte’s inconsistencies. Hamacher’s Fichte cannot conceive of an immediate self-consciousness that is not already mediated by some general term. As we have seen, these generalizations change with activity of the ego producing the ‘not-I’, but without any sense of Hegelian development. Hamacher’s Schlegel, on the other hand, takes the discussion of the grounding of experience outside the sphere of self-consciousness and relocates it in questions of genre and language. This, argues Hamacher, helps, because Schlegel’s explanation turns originality into a project rather than an object. We don’t witness a failure in reflection when the genre in which we currently catch our existence does itself not contain the genre describing it. Rather, this standing aside from it tropes it, like parekbasis or Chorus in a Greek play.24 Part of the same drama of meaning, the apostrophe to or commentary on individuals and events under scrutiny, expounds more of their being. The Chorus does not presume to pronounce absolutely but is another dramatic character interacting in a continuing drama of meaning. Or, deconstructively put (and de Man was greatly attracted to Schlegel), meta-writing is another genre of writing. For Schlegel, though, such commentary, unlike a mirroring reflection, is ‘progressive’, because, as we have seen with Schelling, repetition is here understood not as a redundant but as an expository activity.25 And this dynamic philosophy provides the genuine alternative to thinking of being as only to be understood if cognizable by its subject reflecting upon it.

Now Coleridge’s anti-Babel, to the extent that he develops the idea, shares this escape from reflection. My comments so far on the function he attributes to repetition in his main formulation of imagination and on the disseminating power by which he defines ideas have tended to show this. Common to all Coleridge’s plans for an Opus Maximum is the idea of an encircling ‘Logos’ which is the ‘anti-Babel’ unifying the different ‘logoi’ or disciplines constituting Coleridge’s great work. In the ‘Essays on the Principles of Method’ in The Friend, Coleridge follows Plato, he claims, in defining Ideas as ‘living laws’, and Bacon in naming ‘laws of nature, ideas’. This growth makes for ‘the secure and ever-progressive, though never-ending, investigation of truth and reality by scientific method’. Thus, thinks Coleridge, ‘furnished with fit and respectable credentials, [he can] proceed to the historic importance and practical application of METHOD’.26 These credentials are Platonic and Baconian, corroborated by Hooker; but in the historical context of Coleridge’s philosophy, they are post-Kantian. The sameness with his precursor’s insight simultaneously measures the historical difference of his own expression of them, tailoring to altered circumstances the philosophical intervention he is using them to make, mutatis mutandis. Permanence and progression harmonize in Coleridge’s method not only as regards art and science, but also as regards politics. There the permanent political interest tends to hinder progressive forces, and the troping stops. But the structure of Coleridge’s argument is far from end-stopped, and Coleridge’s neglected general statements vaunting the enjambments of intellectual inquiry within his anti-Babel are worth rehearsing.

The anti-Babel can be traced through Coleridge’s remarks on ‘the Logos, or communicative Intelligence, Natural, Human, and Divine’.27 This single word unifies the different words or ‘logoi’ of the disciplines which, if all put together, would constitute an encyclopaedia of the kind for which Coleridge contributed his Treatise on Method The Christian resonance of schemes of this kind are obvious; audible also is a less doctrinaire religiosity, the kind informing most of Coleridge’s speculations about life as ‘the language of God himself, as uttered by Nature’.28 These Christian and religious inflections do not add much to our understanding of Coleridge’s thought; they do, as I have already said, describe a coincidence by which Coleridge could link his religious passion to his philosophical curiosity. In the terms of our argument so far, this is to say that religion is another troping or progressive repetition of our situation rather than a unique revelation that might conclude this heuristic process:

Should all words have their ground and highest source in the ‘Word’ that was from the beginning, it might appear that a dispute concerning words is the most important subject on which the mind of man could exert its reasoning powers3.29

Sometimes Coleridge’s religious fervour drives him to wish to repeat the Incarnation and himself become a word, a word made flesh: ‘the redeemed & sanctified become finally themselves Words of the Word.’ He concludes this Notebook fantasy: ‘As he is in the Father, even so we in him.’30 Again the repetition is evident: here Coleridge’s desire to repeat Jesus’s incarnation of God. Philosophically speaking, though, a Schellingian nostrum appears, in which not to accept the absolute contraction to our capabilities, so that we can progressively follow through its implications, is to undo all possibilities of coherence – a temptation he diagnoses in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’. On this belief, as suggested above, is based Schelling’s definition of an aberrant evil, or a growth outside the economy of the human self’s well-being, like a disease. For Coleridge, in a late (1829) Notebook entry, to imagine the ‘suspension’ of the Logos is ‘the synthesis of Nonsense and Blasphemy’. In “miracles of Religion’ we should ‘behold the abbreviations of the Miracle of the Universe’. We should, presumably, then set about unpacking these abbreviations and unfolding our universe rather than hope to discover an otherworldly alternative to it?31 Its laws are diverse enough in their applications for sheer existence to resonate with the miraculous.

On the other hand, I don’t think it will do to see Coleridge as a philosophical rationalist for whom religion is a provisional troping of philosophical concerns, one to be superseded by the completion of philosophy. But I want to suggest that this is as unlikely as his espousal of the reverse view that philosophy occupies the rudimentary position to be consummated in religious apprehension. One Table Talk entry suggests Hegelian Aufhebung at work:

I show to each system that I fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then I lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to see its former position, where it was, indeed, but under another light and with different relations; – so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained.32

Coleridge’s failure ever to explain this explanation must be due at least partly to his commitment to an idea that successive disclosure rather than cyclical recapitulation was the true shape of philosophical progress. At still other times, he sounds like Kant, or a pre-Jena philosopher: ‘the Noumenon, I say, is the Logos, the WORD .. .’33 To be committed to all of these philosophical positions would be, as Wellek insisted long ago, straightforwardly confusing and muddled. On the other hand, to exonerate such contradictory allegiances by saying they all trope each other would make criticism impossible. Nevertheless, the philosophy of poetry and the poetry of philosophy do come closer to each other in any attempt to understand Coleridge’s sense of an existence bound by its diverse repetitions of an original sameness.

Ominously for Coleridge’s theology, as I have been emphasizing, this is the pattern, a philosophical pattern spoken in the language of the German philosophers, which continually recurs. Let me finish with a famous Coleridgean synopsis.

Saturday Night, April 14, 1805 – In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an ... [obscure] feeling as if that new phaenomenon were the dim Awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature / It is still interesting as a Word, a Symbol! It is Aoyoç, the Creator! <and the Evolver!>34

I believe many of the themes I have been discussing are here in this entry, but strung together, unsystematically, almost paratactically. Distrust of the new, yet appreciation that the historical repetition of the same is what defines difference, are sentiments linked to Coleridge’s overall feeling that his mundane affiliation is part of some sort of communicative logic at work in the world. Religious terminology beckons, but equally we are offered the idea that our self-consciousness is bound up with an evolving discourse that never lays claim to have abstracted from or imprisoned nature in psychic space, and to whose continuing stamina this particular philosopher must attune himself. Already Coleridge writes in an idiom that can be fruitfully glossed by the main philosophical idioms of his day, idioms that emerge from Kant and are developed by the Jena Romantics and are criticized by Hegel. Hegel’s inability to see off the Schellingian alternative emerging out of Jena allows that open philosophy most congenial to Coleridge to persist. Coleridge’s subsequent protestations, caught up in the embarrassments of plagiarism, obscure a deep affinity of temperament with Schelling. But nothing conclusive can be established. Coleridge’s conversation with the Germans, like the one they have amongst themselves, is ongoing, perhaps infinite. We are left with a tantalizing picture of the reflective temperament, and a quintessentially intellectual attempt to use poetic and religious discourse to see round the boundaries of factual description and to feel literal reality all the more intensely through the idea that it is spoken, addressed, to us.