Coleridge’s effect on biographers can be quite revelatory, starting, appropriately, with the effect he has on himself. This is due to two main factors. The first is the contemporary importance attaching to the idea of the self in philosophical explanation. ‘Self-consciousness is now the principle of all philosophy’, announced Schelling in his Abhandlungen of 1796/7, a work closely read by Coleridge.1 For the moment, all that needs saying in this regard is that post-Kantian philosophers interested in developing purposive or teleological explanations of our place in nature are obliged to use vocabularies usually thought of as belonging to personal rather than scientific judgements. Explanations of how science is possible seem to require the self-determination of an absolute reality to facilitate our relativist experience of it. Accordingly, reality’s proportionate response to our attempts to know it invites voluntarist descriptions. These could vary in sophistication from religious fundamentalism to Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’. Coleridge enthusiastically participated in this movement. The second factor is the peculiar nature of biography and its relation to autobiography. In the Romantic age, life-writing from Wordsworth’s The Prelude to Byron’s Don Juan, Godwin’s Life of Chaucer to Scott’s (and Hazlitt’s) Life of Napoleon, became an especially complex literary kind. ‘Shakespeare’s life was an allegory,’ wrote Keats, ‘his works are the comments on it.’2 One might have expected things to be the other way round, but the Romantic self remains a philosophical subject elusive to literal description and conventional biographical or autobiographical effort. Terms such as ‘personality’ and ‘egoism’ became as much technical terms of appraisal as pejorative criticisms nostalgic for neoclassical norms. I want to begin by looking at this second factor.
One might begin unpacking the difficulties by saying that autobiography emulates the objectivity of biography, while biography aspires to the intimacy of autobiography. This supportive relationship between the two is problematic, though. Autobiography is, in an important sense, incorrigible; mistakes satisfy its expressive logic as convincingly as accuracies. The fact that someone gets particular facts of her life wrong will more than likely tell us more about her, perhaps about the kind of life she wanted to have led, perhaps about revealing repressions, fears, desires and affect generally that might not get expressed any other way. To catch someone out is still to catch them, to catch more of them maybe than is visible when they are not telling stories about themselves. Biography, therefore, by aspiring to the inwardness of autobiography, must aspire to an authority that is permitted to be mistaken in the same way. But of course biography cannot be granted this license: it would then simply tell lies or mislead by its errors unless, that is, we turn it into autobiography too and get more interested in the author than her subject. So autobiography’s desire to be objective like biography is undermined by the role model it itself has supplied to biography. The whole thing goes round in circles. It’s no use answering that biography tells the truth about the lies if it is in the act of lying that the most intimate revelation takes place. More as in Lacanian psychoanalysis, we detect ourselves neither in the truth nor in our disguise of it, but in the movement from one to the other. The biography would have to reproduce this act of departure from its subject to get that close; it would have to lie in a way that produced more of its subject.3
Consistent with this aporia, Coleridge suggests in his Opus Maximum that self-apprehension is always vicarious. Here once more he transposes from Kantian apperception into the more dramatic register of the post-Kantians.
For if... by the ‘Self we mean the principle of individuation ... it is manifest that the self in this sense must be anterior to all our sensations etc., .. . Now the self is ever presupposed, and like all other supersensual subjects can be presented [scored out] <made known> to the mind only by a representative. And again, what that representative shall be is by no means unalterably fixed in human nature by nature itself, but on the contrary varies with the growth, bodily, moral, and intellectual, of each individual. (p. 30)
Self-coincidence is impossible. We have to delegate stand-ins, character actors, perpetually, at each stage of our experience. No doubt we take responsibility for our past and plan our future. But, in a radical sense, we are neither of these. This is not to repeat the biographical cliché of ‘She or he is not what they were’. We just don’t experience ourselves with a contrary immediacy. We are always not x, y or z. Our failure to be ‘presented’, Coleridge’s scoring out seems to be saying, is the way we are ‘made known’. And creatively interesting writing is the kind that, perhaps like Coleridge’s, can get round such reflective failings in a dramatically effective way. Schelling and Coleridge wrote in ways that showed that they believed, unlike Lacan, in this redemptive possibility.4
This worry is very abstract, one about the logical form of biography and autobiography. But do things get any easier when we descend to the kinds of writing involved? Biography or autobiography is usually disciplined by a strict awareness of the genre it has employed to make itself plausible. Conversion narrative, success story, case analysis, special pleading, apology, publicity, defence, faithful record – any number of models offer themselves. Without creating confidence that this is the kind of story to tell about someone’s life, the best that self-writing of either kind could do would be to try to replicate the continuum of a life, the flow of impressions one imagines was received by a certain person in a certain place at a certain time. As soon as an effort is made to represent also the sorting process by which this sequence hangs together and makes sense, genre of some kind begins. And of course, where genre supervenes, any uniqueness distinguishing the coherence of the individual experience is lost. This is the generic paradox of both biography and autobiography. In order to make sense it loses the singularity of description that was supposedly its intention.
Yet biography does often, with unjustified insouciance, lay claim to that uniqueness. Built into the very concept of autobiography seems to be this aspiration that, logically speaking, appears misguided. Biography can regard its necessary genres as displacements or stand-ins, as masks hiding an irreducibly immediate experience that it is the task of self-writing somehow to express. The biographer promises us an intimacy that dispenses with the niceties of literary convention: the ‘real’ Coleridge, which, if as unlikely a find as ‘the real language of men’, forever exerts its sway. Rather like the fiction advertising biopics – Denzel Washington is Malcolm X, Judi Dench is Iris Murdoch – its publicity disables its own dramatic cachet. There seems no room left for acting until, that is, we remember that modern method acting is very precisely intimate with the fictional resources of our ostensibly literal self-presentation. Disregard for the need to advertise that I am acting someone is justified by claiming that I am introducing myself into the modes of acting by which the person imitated presents a face to the world – how she cuts a figure in the world. Biographical ‘method’ is the untested bridge thrown across this gap. So Richard Holmes, nothing if not confident, concludes his first volume of Coleridge’s biography: ‘and biography cannot stop, because it must conform to the complication, strength, and strangeness of life. (That is its power over fiction, the authority of truth.) ‘5 When Derrida died, The Times had an editorial making merry over the supposed uncertainty for a deconstructionist of the fact of Derrida’s death.6 The propriety of, editorially, dancing on his grave, is backed up by Holmes’s ‘authority of truth’. But it is of course the ‘endless’ quality of writing to which Holmes nods in his biographer’s credo that Derrida’s work tries never to forget. Quite how Holmes gets hold of this ‘endless’ without a few fictions embarrassing the ascendancy of his ‘authority of truth’ is puzzling. What would it amount to on the page, anyway? That this kind of endless writing closes on its subject with an exquisite conformity surpassing all fictional representation, yet, at the same time, succeeds in avoiding complete effacement, remains an article of faith. We should now remember the first factor energizing Coleridge’s own grasp of biography. At the time Holmes’s biographical subject was alive, Hegel made it his life’s work to show how the concept, separated from its object in order to produce information about it, might be reunified in an ultimate knowledge in which the rationality of the world has become totally transparent. This is a conclusion that Derrida’s grammatology rules out of court. But Holmes the biographer, somehow assured that his visible authorship and that of truth are transparently the same, makes as short work of the problem as a leader-writer. Biographers’ ignorance of the philosophical agon their sort of project caused at the time neglects hopelessly, in Coleridge’s case, a preoccupation central to a philosophical imagination like his.
Equally neglectful, however, of the matrix of Coleridge’s philosophical grasp of the self are those accounts which say, effectively, that autobiography and biography are simply the descriptions of their own impossibility. Coleridge’s philosophical compeers describe the doubly paradoxical emergence of an individual self in a process of separation from its authentic but trans-individual origins in order eventually to receive articulation from inter-subjective generalizations. The impersonal source and the shared definitions appear to lose the uniqueness of the self twice over. But Coleridge’s thought, I have argued, does appear to negotiate this combination of Schelling and Hegel. Paul de Man, on the other hand, describes a revolving door of perpetual substitutions in which the self that is displaced in order, autobiographically, to view itself is in turn only grasped by revoking that substitution. The ‘face’ given to the subject in autobiography is taken back, leaving the subject ‘defaced’. The written self is obviously produced by the writer, but also reads her, and comes back out of de Man’s revolving door as quickly as she goes in. De Man believes this ‘turn’ exposes the condition under which all signification labours. He therefore values autobiography only as an accentuation of a general state of semiotic affairs. For the Romantics, though, the autobiographical impasse grounds and explains how knowledge is possible as well as showing the tortuous passages between individual and general involved. De Man’s ‘specular moment’ is really an undoing of Kant’s theory of apperception, in which the subject thinking itself must differ from its thought in a disabling manner. The later de Man is not so bound to the logic of reflection and looks instead to understand the performative dimension – parabasis or ekbasis – by which self-framing convinces us dramatically to overlook the aporia arrived at logically. In this later position, we find something more appropriate to the post-Kantian dilemma Coleridgean performance so singularly posed.7
The suitably endless biography is clearly an impossible task. The outdistancing of life obviously happens in life itself. Nevertheless there is an opposite view that is picked up by The Times (apparently a Hegelian newspaper). It is true to the phenomenology of our own experience that we only know what we’ve lived through personally when we’re able to write it down, when we generalize about it. But Coleridge, like Schelling and in keeping with the speculative strain in Hegel, is one of the most powerful examples of a subject who inspires his biographers to realize that when this articulation of experience is achieved the present quality of lived experience has departed. Like Hegel’s philosopher, the biographer is always wise after the event, although unlike Hegel’s owl of Minerva he or she has no sense of the belatedness of their image of life (Gestalt des Lebens).8 Coleridge’s advocacy of ‘the heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF’ in Biographia Literaria as ‘the postulate of philosophy’ is troubled by his earlier insistence that ignorance is as much a constituent of self-consciousness as understanding:’ Until you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding’ (I. 252, 232). This (paradoxically) defining indeterminacy leads him continually from psychology to ontology, ‘the science of BEING altogether’. His subsequent religious glossings of this loss of self as embracement by God (BL I, 283) cannot erase his participation in the fundamental philosophical matrix of his day. In these formulations, he is usually lodged deep in passages from Schelling, deploying positions as a player in the contemporary debate about the grounding of philosophy in an absolute self-consciousness. The debate centres on the loss of coherence entailed by enlisting this authority. How can the finite identity contain a repetition of the creative act of an ‘infinite I AM’ (BL I, 304)? For Schelling, the creative act of the infinite is to realize just this contraction. To such philosophers, exactly this undifferentiated, conceptually unmanaged existence, ‘the IMMEDIATE, which dwells in every man’, is retrospectively constructed by every mediating and so distorting generic description we require to make sense of our own experience (BL I, 243). Were that ambiguous link, simultaneously masking and disclosing, not to exist, our specific abstractions from Being would lack an essential authority. We may envy an ontological intimacy that is unabbreviated conceptually, but we may only long for it retrospectively. Equally, our conventional self-consciousness can’t be produced without conjuring up its inchoate source. We enter a dilemma in which our experience only belongs to us because it doesn’t. It doesn’t in two ways. The authenticating source has nothing of the personal about it; and the differentiated identity by which we differ from it employs categories everybody else uses, and so does not distinguish us uniquely. Psychoanalysis is perhaps the most familiar attempt to orchestrate this dialectic. In Lacan’s revision of Hegel (via Kojève) our symbolic systems perpetually register, in ways open to unconventional reading, the plenitude we must belong to but can’t sensibly live in.
Again updating Hegelianism, we can say that, inevitably logocentric, our expressions can only gesture at what they have annulled by putting a line through themselves, by appearing sous râture. But Coleridge’s chaotic life forces his biographers to attempt the vertiginous road back from Derridean modesty to the Romantic portentousness Heidegger admired in Schelling. Sheer diffuseness cannot, given Coleridge’s philosophical situation, just be written off. Something else is disclosed, akin to what we know in less articulate people, but also what we hold them accountable for having shaped and made self-defining decisions about. This emergence from unconscious determinants for which we are held responsible fascinated Schelling in the drafts for his unfinished Weltalter, a biography on the largest scale of past, present and future. Can Schelling, in whose thought Coleridge was steeped, help us interpret Coleridge’s literary biography? Or can Coleridge’s autobiographical ruses widen our understanding of philosophy’s investigation of its own grounding, a preoccupation he himself lived through? Like Schelling, Coleridge thought that to move behind scientific explanation was to enter a realm of freedom. The cost paid for this enlargement, though, was the ability to describe it in the particularized way other things are described. A problem of communication lay at the heart of philosophy, and this crisis took the shape of the autobiographical question.
So, if conspicuously generic biographies of Coleridge sound philosophically brisk, empathetic ones sound naïve and (literally) self-defeating. Autobiography, understood in the manner of Romantic philosophy, is a solvent of particular genres and the promoter of the idea of a universal genre. Schelling understands nature’s compatibility with our faculties and needs on analogy with a choice of genre. In his System it is the Iliad and the Odyssey of spirit; less specifically in the Freiheitschrift and then in the Weltalter, the Absolute contraction for our benefit into a world to which we can belong is a performance all parties unravel at their peril. Return to a precontractual existence is no specular substitution but an unmanageable increase in Being that Schelling calls evil. Coleridge’s autobiographical ambitions for philosophy do appear to anticipate this kind of approach: ‘Seem to have made up my mind to write my metaphysical works, as my Life, & in my Life – intermixed with all the other events / or history of the mind & fortunes of S. T. Coleridge’.9 No single genre, autobiography here reads simultaneously from the inside and the outside, or reads the outside as the inside, with all the expressive variety that entails. The historical precedents and accompaniments of this tactic now need looking at.
The most thoroughgoing and picturesque critique of the idea of an autonomous self contemporary with Coleridge’s career is Hegel’s account of self-consciousness in his Phenomenology of 1806. Hegel’s excoriation of Stoicism, Scepticism and the ‘unhappy consciousness’ takes apart three versions of autobiographical absolutism. Hegel condemns Stoicism for its abstraction from the world. It attains an admirable self-sufficiency and claims to have established freedom, but only through an inward autonomy that declutches from actuality. Like the ‘beautiful soul’, the aesthetic version of stoicism, it achieves an equilibrium of self-consciousness because it retreats from that mutually reflective shaping of self and world essential to Hegelian dialectic. Hegel’s confidence that the external world is ultimately rational means that any foreshortening of the attempt to equate self-consciousness with reality diminishes the former, our own rationality, as much as it abbreviates the latter, its natural embodiment. In Charles Taylor’s words, it ‘leads us into a kind of formalism’.10 It leads also to scepticism and a religious otherworldliness, both of which gain authority only through detachment and a kind of conscientious objection to that struggle towards a rationally ordered world that Hegel understands to be the project of Geist. Taken to its logical conclusion, Stoicism’s ultimate assertion of freedom is suicide, the most extreme sequestration from the world, the choice of that famous late Stoic, Seneca.
Stoicism has a long history and many forms. Hegel’s reading, as Robert Solomon states, is selective, weighted towards the later, Roman version of its thought, neglectful of earlier forms to which the young Hegel and his fellow student, Hölderlin, had been attracted.11 It is not evident, though, that Coleridge would have warmed even to these forms of Stoicism. In the ‘Prolegomena’ to his edition of the Opus Maximum, Thomas McFarland sees Stoicism as a prime target for the Christian Coleridge, not least because of the embarrassing precursor that Stoicism supplies for Christianity. The Hegelian progression from Stoicism to the ‘unhappy consciousness’ with which he has been thought by many to characterize a religious sensibility obviously vindicates these fears. But Stoicism also offends the Coleridgean sense of self in its older versions, the kinds evoked by post-modernist thinkers like Gilles Deleuze whose interest in anomie, event, and the logic of a sense immune to conventional moralism or generalization can be profitably reflected back on what I have called the autobiographical absolutism of Romantics like Coleridge. For Hegel, such presumption would conjure up Fichte’s “I = I”, an interiorization of the epistemological relation that tries to overcome the aporia of reflection with performance.12 We saw that Coleridge called Fichte ‘hyper-stoic’. Performance, though, is just what undoes the conceptual management of autobiography in the postmodern reworking of Stoicism that also seems to recapture Romantic speculations.
The Stoic attitude can be described as unprincipled to the extent that it remains indifferent to the vagaries of fate. This indifference has both an ethical and a scientific dimension. Ethically, Stoicism promotes disengagement from the struggle against oppression; it fosters a consistently inward disposition that makes one adaptable to all occasions rather than outraged by them. The philosophy of the slave, Epictetus, is the great example of this successful re-description of one’s labour as no longer reflecting the masters’ dominance but as providing the self-consolidating compensations of labour. Labour, in that now sinister phrase, can make one free. Its use as the slogan over the gates of Auschwitz, though, gives the lie, as Hegel would have wanted, to the slave mentality. You cannot claim absolute self-sufficiency for anything that does not engage with the project of aligning the world with freedom. Hegel attacked the Stoic consolations of philosophical alternatives to the way the world goes. Nevertheless, stepping aside from the path of Hegel’s dialectic, we can see how Stoicism has become interestingly fissured. On the one hand, it sounds like a potentially boring and ultimately culpable imperturbability, on the other, it disposes one to react creatively to each event, reformulating an inner integrity in response to each new challenge to its imperviousness to external circumstance. The Stoic is never outraged by a violation of principle in his or her treatment, never embarrassed or discomfited by the recalcitrance of reality to moral rules.
What of the Stoic attitude to science? Stoicism opposes the scientific struggle to comprehend systematically, in terms of cause and effect, a recalcitrant reality. In Gilles Deleuze’s aphorism, ‘the Stoic paradox is to affirm destiny and to deny necessity’.13 The Stoic’s radical interiority also places him or her in a position of ‘pure exteriority’ to the chains of cause and effect supporting scientific generalization. The distinction between an internal mind and an external body no longer helps here. This slipping behind that ultimate division, or Urteil, constitutive of judgement, would obviously strike a chord with the young Hölderlin. Manfred Frank argues that Hölderlin’s philosophy of Being in his very early Urtheil und Seyn (Judgement and Being) claimed Schelling’s allegiance before Schelling was captivated by the dominant Fichtean idiom he was conclusively breaking out of by 1800.14 Deleuze admired Schelling as one ‘who brings difference out of the night of the identical’.15 Deleuze’s neo-Stoicism favours a Schellingian Absolute, which develops itself through original differences and occasions, over a Hegelian one, which he thinks proceeds always in accordance with the principle of contradiction. The Stoic deals in events rather than causes, and events, therefore, are best understood as being linked expressively: they possess the coherence of a repeated present, and are not to be explained as the conclusions of natural necessity.16 The compossibility of incompatibles in the Stoic view of the universe is most easily grasped on analogy with the inconsistencies of a self; for inconsistency does not in any way disqualify one from having a personality, indeed may help typify it. Self-difference testifies to its unconscious variety of motives and desires rather than disqualifies it or throws it into disabling contradiction.
Ethically and epistemologically, then, the Stoic position might frighten Coleridge by figuring too closely his actual philosophical predisposition. ‘Of the sects of ancient philosophy’, he wrote in Aids to Reflection, ‘the Stoic is, perhaps, the nearest to Christianity.’ Yet Coleridge’s difference with Stoicism is here described not doctrinally but as a disagreement over affect. Stoicism denies feelings in order to be moral; Coleridge’s Christianity brings ‘Feelings to a conformity with the Commands of the Conscience. Its especial aim, its characteristic operation, is to moralize the affections’ (Aids 96).17or Coleridge, Stoicism clearly goes against his philosophy of friendship which we saw insist on communicative action to halt the progress of Stoicism into scepticism and the unhappy consciousness. Hamlet, a character to whom Coleridge was notoriously attracted and whom he characterized as experiencing a disabling incongruence between inner resources and outward action, allied himself to the Stoical character he attributed to Horatio: ‘Give me that man / That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core.’ Hamlet’s enthusiasm for Stoicism would have made his double, Coleridge, anxious to prove that the Christian historicization of Stoicism had truly rendered it obsolete.18 ‘Something too much of this,’ he might have urged with the Prince.
The difficulties in disaffiliating himself from Stoicism would occur where Stoicism more vividly coincided with the kind of literary, inventive sketches he was offering of the mind’s own self-experience in thinking in Biographia Literaria and elsewhere. Stoicism supplied a pagan near approximation of Coleridge’s own uninhibited self-apprehension. But inwardness out of control mutates into the fanaticism Coleridge frequently condemns in Biographia Literaria, what Kant called the Schwärmerei of unmanageable thought, the ‘magic rod of fanaticism ... preserved in the very adyta of human nature’(BL I, 30, 197). This, if you like, is Coleridge’s version of an ‘unhappy consciousness’ from whose religiosity he could, like Hegel, disassociate himself. He constantly justified the range of his own self-exploration with exorbitant promises, manifestos, programmes, dismissals of the closures of other thinkers, and so on. These are the autobiographical ruses with which he formed an attack on convention, opposing any one set of rules for describing the self. It is a constant rhetorical struggle, though, to distinguish them from the Stoical and fanatical susceptibilities he simultaneously condemns. Always justified in the final instance by appeal to biography, his variegated writing acts, as we have seen, like a solvent on genre. The anti-Hegelian delight in Stoicism of a Deleuzean kind has made more visible for us the Stoic resonances in this alternative to going by the rules. Deleuze, though, happily accepted the risks to intellectual respectability involved.
Politically, Stoicism favoured a kind of universal republic, suggesting what came to be known as cosmopolitanism. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge remembers his earlier description in his periodical The Watchman of British supporters of the French Revolution who typically ‘expatriated’ themselves (BL I, 190). To be a ‘citizen of the world’ could imply the unexceptionable consequence of humane learning in heroes as acceptable as Goldsmith’s; or it could recall the Stoicism stemming from Lipsius, Montaigne and others, that worried the Elizabethan and Stuart establishments in various thinkers up to Hobbes.19 Political Stoicism’s replacement of absolute external authority by absolute inner authority was early recognized, and the consequent Hegelian progression from Stoicism to scepticism anxiously anticipated. Acceptance of authority precisely because essentially it doesn’t matter, because it holds no sway in foro interno, is a shaky foundation for political obedience. Yet such pragmatism would be the consequence of a Stoical desire to preserve inner virtue at all costs. In Richard Tuck’s verdict, ‘Stoicism and raison d’état went together’.20 Unsurprisingly, Montaigne was instinctively conservative; so was that epitome of the ‘unhappy consciousness’, John Calvin. Both advised an allegiance to the political status quo which went hand in hand with a Stoical self-government renouncing any interest in reforming external political authority. Nevertheless, Calvinism inspired much religious conflict, and, later, the antinomianism feeding into spectacular Romantic discussions of the untrammelled inner life with its accompanying public disorder, such as Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. And stoicism clearly is an element in the Rousseauism attributed to the Jacobins.
In a recent essay, Galen Strawson opposed ‘episodic’ to ‘diachronic’ self-experience, claiming that the former had as strong claims to being a proper description of our inner life as the latter.21 Diachronic self-experience is fundamentally (though not necessarily) dependent on narrative, while the episodic mode deals in all sorts of ‘form-finding’ exercises, understanding the past as a charging or feature of the present moment. Strawson has lists of both diachronics and episodics, and among the latter he places Coleridge, the Stoics and Montaigne. He also notes that the diachronic mode enjoys a current dominance in explanations of self-experience, although he believes this is unjustified, and even undesirable. Although working within different terms of reference, he is as anti-Hegelian as Deleuze. Like Deleuze, he is also a Bergsonian, although he probably comes to Bergson inadvertendy via Proust. Constantly reworked whenever it is accessed, the past cannot, according to Bergsonism, precede ‘the creative act which constitutes’ it.22 For Strawson, emphasizing matière more than mémoire, ‘it turns out to be an inevitable consequence of the neurophysiological process of laying down memories that every studied conscious recall of past events brings an alteration. The implication is plain: the more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your own being’. Clearly an episodic Stoicism, alive on every occasion to the ‘present-shaping consequences of the past’ might inform autobiography with a sharper historical sense than would diachronic narrative.23 But was there a tradition offering an orderly political alternative to the line privileging self-consciousness, which ran from Stoic to Sceptic to Christian, and which Hegel dismissed?
Machiavelli, for instance, argues for a necessary connection existing between reasons of state and the creative adequacy of the great political leader to all occasions. In emergencies, when the republic is under threat, the Prince deploys an unscripted pragmatism in response to whatever fortune throws up; he shows himself equal to events not predictable within the diachronic narratives whose explanatory efficacy is suspected by Strawson. The exemplary prince possesses the power to inform (Coleridge’s integrating Einbildungskraft) the occasion. Hamlet, despairing of matching the example set by Fortinbras, inveighs against, amongst other things, his loss of Machiavellian credentials: ‘How all occasions do inform against me.’24 Again, a Stoical capacity to act rightly irrespective of rules and precedent is very much akin to a singular creativity; except that the biography of this defining facility will change with each occasion on which it has to make up its own rules. In Gramsci’s updating, the ‘modern prince’ has become the social class (not an individual) whose creative response to history is vindicated by its growing ascendancy or hegemony. Hegel’s desired coincidence of private and public reason is to be achieved in the direction opposite to that advocated in his Phenomenology. Public is to be transmuted into private, not vice versa, by the persuasive performance of a class rationalized by embedded, ‘organic’ intellectuals. They set the standard for consensus.
Gramsci thought that the battle to win consensus was just that: a contest open to all political persuasions. To a degree, this is also the victory Coleridge must have envisaged for his intellectual Clerisy. Comparably embedded in the popular community, as its National Church, distinct from any religious denomination, it represented the section of society he wanted to take the political lead. It was to do so, in Coleridge’s imagery, by an infectious growth. The ‘germ’ in ‘every parish’, the Clerisy’s members work like a benevolent, civilizing virus to instruct the populace in their essential well-being, a self-understanding crossing as many boundaries as there are aspects of ‘progressive amelioration’ (BL I. 227).25 And it is towards the vindication of this authority that his autobiographical performance makes its contribution, resisting conventional boundaries and customary disciplinary demarcations. ‘Principles’, as he commends them in Biographia Literaria and elsewhere, seem intended to describe a consistency elusive to orthodox, rule-governed notions of order, an authority akin to that of an imitation organically intimate with its original in the way that a copy cannot be. Here the rule is no rule of thumb, learned inductively from the past: a principle is inseparable from the productivity that realizes the event, not retrospective but ‘the germs of a prophecy’. Coleridge’s chosen example with which to introduce the notion of ‘principles’ is the apparent contradiction of Burke in supporting the American and condemning the French revolutions. A private consistency, the consistency of a personality, sets a standard justifying the apparent inconsistency of ‘practical inferences’ (BL I, 191-2). Burke is valued by Coleridge not as a doctrinal figure, but as a viral force: ‘in Mr Burke’s writings indeed the germs of almost all political truths may be found’ (BL I, 217). Burke’s thought displays a rhizomatic, nomadic power unconfined to a single political territory, to adapt Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terminology, virtues elaborated by Coleridge in his clinching example following that of Burke.26 For Coleridge next goes on to discuss the influence of the great Venetian colourist, Titian. The prophetic principle or idea explaining his unique achievement has disseminated so widely and ungovernably that it demonstrates, in the anecdote told Coleridge by Sir George Beaumont, that ‘our very sign boards ... give evidence that there has been a Titian in the world’ (BL I, 192).
Summarizing these points, we can say that Coleridge’s free and easy attitude towards the writing of his autobiography evinces both confidence and trepidation. Coleridge’s autobiography is, by turns, droll, pompous and strategic. It toys with the varieties of inwardness at its disposal in a knowing, sometimes arch manner. It is evidently acquainted with post-Kantian attempts, following from Kant’s third Critique, to universalize the individual experience without using scientific concepts. It is both exhilarated and suspicious of this grounding of philosophy in an inward Absolute. He lived at a time when the major philosophical effort was to see round the limits of idealism, or a philosophy of self-consciousness, and glimpse a human character more integrated than the Kantian one divided between phenomenal experience and noumenal obligation. Hegel’s critique of self-consciousness portrayed inwardness as a progress from the slave’s inner freedom from his master to Stoicism, and then through scepticism to the unhappy consciousness that apparently trusts in an otherworldly religious consolation. Certainly it can only be helped by a third party prescribing from outside the exhausted dialectic of self-consciousness. In all three cases, Hegel detected a crucial de-clutching from practical action, or the political project behind his Phenomenology of squaring social reality with rationality. Coleridge, in his remarks on Stoicism, is also anxious about the interchangeability of pagan and Christian categories. But, understood contrary to Hegel’s critique, Stoicism could be described as a creative response to, not escape from, each moral and political event as it occurs. And there is a well-trodden tradition in political thought attaching to this response, the one that privileges reasons of state over conventional ethical or religious directives. Although this sounds initially unpromising in helping to understand Christian Coleridge, in fact it does assist. Machiavelli’s exemplary Prince produces history in response to the occasions fortune strews in his path, unexpectedly and unpredictably. An individual virtue redefines public policy, analogous to the way in which Coleridge’s Clerisy, composed of individuals philosophically acquainted with Idea and Principle – those prophetic, germlike powers of intellectual dissemination, unbound by strict rule and precedent and capable of unforeseen historical transformation (Titian and sign boards) – are to educate the populace. Where the self-dispersal of ostensibly capricious autobiography in fact mimes this process, as Coleridge frequently indicates it does, then Biographia Literaria is justified.
When, therefore, we confront Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, we are presented with a standing refutation of the ‘Coleridge’ of much conventional biography. Instead, the apparently dysfunctional dissipation of Coleridge’s autobiographical effort recapitulates the central philosophical effort of his age to understand the vocabularies of selfhood that model an understanding of Being. Logically speaking, Being is like a universal quantifier, provided we accept that no individual value can satisfy it. This is as much as to say that logical discourse just doesn’t work here. Anterior to the scientific realm, a purposive language of freedom rushes in to fill the void left by the categories by which we understand the world. In this spiritual alternative, the medium by which we understand each other is, according to Coleridge’s translation from Schelling’s Abhandlungen, ‘freedom’; and so ‘besides the language of words, there is a language of spirits’ (BL I, 244, 290). So Coleridge searches for a language adequate to freedom. It is understandably assumed this must be an aesthetic expression, specifically that language of poetry over whose definition he claims to be disputing with Wordsworth throughout Biographia Literaria. Further backing is added when in his System, the work Coleridge most openly acknowledges as his source, Schelling pronounces aesthetic intuition to be the objective form of the immediate intuition of freedom. In art, in other words, we can experience a repetition (‘a second intuition’, zweite Anschauung)27 of that contraction of absolute possibilities to finite form. The assumption that this second intuition has to be aesthetic is understandable given the way it fits into Biographia Literaria’s plot or one of them (to settle the controversy over what might constitute ‘a real poetic character’ ). But Schelling never says that the aesthetic is the only possible form of this repetition, and Coleridge’s ontology, largely couched in theological language, suggests he didn’t think this either. Yet the aesthetic concentration of solutions in Coleridge’s most famous work has fed a Romantic ideology that self-servingly ignores all other non-scientific forms of being in the world in favour of the aesthetic.
In its peculiar, Romantic meaning, freedom becomes the name for something much wider than a single genre. Schelling’s early Abhandlungen (1795), from which Coleridge draws and plagiarizes much of the philosophical context in the first volume of Biographia Literaria, is actually an exposition of Fichte. Its full tide, translated, is Treatises on the Explanation of the Idealism of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’; and it basically addresses the question of what should be the fate of Kantianism after Kant. Schelling is not concerned with what stands in the way of the dissemination of Kant’s philosophy, but with the reasons why both adherents and opponents have fundamentally misunderstood it. And the reason turns out to be that Kantianism has been misinterpreted as being an academic exercise (nur von Schulphilosophen verstanden).28 Then comes the language of spirits passage, showing that from the start of his treatise Schelling is homing in on the languages of freedom he thinks that Kant is calling for in contradistinction to the technical, obscure, academic jargon with which his philosophy highlights this linguistic need. Since his days at the Tübingen Stift, Schelling had opposed the official post-Kantian establishment which, he thought, in its observance of the letter rather than the spirit of Kantian philosophy, had unscrupulously narrowed Kant’s meaning to support a reactionary religious establishment.29 The person capable of addressing Schelling’s central post-Kantian question – ‘What finally is the real content of our representations?’ – is above all not one ‘to whom his own existence is itself a lifeless thought (matter Gedanke)’.30 The sign of a fitting philosophical animation is to be aware, unlike devotees and opponents of Kant alike, that an immediate intuition is at the basis of Kantianism, and is preceded by a liveliness of sensibility (eine Affektion unserer Sinnlichkeit).31 And the languages of this integrated, characteristically human response employ the expressive resources of an entire culture, not the terminology of the schools. But they do so with philosophical knowingness, as a sign of the limitations of cerebration or formal reasoning. Ultimately this will involve both Schelling and Coleridge in the freighting of Reason with sense, imagination and affect. This transgression of the boundaries Kant drew round the different faculties can look initially like that anthropologizing of logic deplored by Kant, but it is actually its opposite.32 The logic of reflection, in other words, by which reality mirrors what we are capable of understanding of it, must give way to other more expressive forms of orientation, more akin to autobiographical performance, perhaps, if we are to grasp the production of knowledge in the round.
Now Schelling takes Fichte as the precedent for all this, but Coleridge is well aware of the younger man’s existential originality here. Early on in the Abhandlungen, Schelling shows that he is moving on. He argues that ‘Mind / Spirit (Geist), while principally intuiting Objects, only intuits itself.33 By the time of Schelling’s Darlegung of 1806, his final Fichtean exposition, Geist is interchangeable with das Seyn, or Being.34 But earlier, the neo-Platonic worry that knowledge of something is only possible by something of a like nature has already merged for the post-Kantians with the problem of joining together Kant’s two worlds of noumena and phenomena, moral and cognitive experience, more securely than Kant himself did. Coleridge shared this neo-Platonic matrix of the problem, but also made Schelling’s easy transition to Kantian problems (BL I, 114-15). Basically, Schelling views the realm of necessity and objective law, phenomena, as a repetition of the realm of freedom, or noumena. So far this is pure Fichte, for whom the external world is the not-I required for the I’s own self-defining activity to take place. But Schelling goes on to claim that ‘Spirit ( Geist) is only Spirit insofar as it becomes an Object for itself, insofar, that is, as it becomes finite’.35 This statement has two implications, taking Schelling well beyond Fichte and accentuating his voluntarist position. The first is the implication that the universal subject here determines itself both by adopting objective form and by choosing to do so, determining objects and determining to do so in a voluntary sense. The second implication is that we then encounter the performance of eternal becoming (ewiges Werden) as our knowledge or science of the world repeats and maps the drama of a spirit that constrains itself (selbst beschränkt) in the endless act of producing itself. But grasp of what that constraint has involved is not to be gained from the point of view of consciousness, of mind or one side of the self-division of Geist. Rather, as with Kant, feeling has to come in to supplement philosophical thinking. The positive activity of Geist in bounding itself with objective form is to give it the possibility of becoming something; the negative activity in so determining and shrinking its boundlessness is felt as grieving or regret (Leiden).36
Sensibility, an affectivity that is wider than the merely aesthetic, comes in to supplement the deficiencies of philosophy in delineating the full parameters of the theory of knowledge. When Coleridge makes his own advance on Fichte in Biographia Literaria, it is more helpful to read it as this kind of insistence on a richer self active in philosophical thinking than a mistaken objection to Fichte’s ‘egoism’: mistaken since Fichte, as mentioned above, was discussing the universal subject needed to explain how knowledge is possible and how Kant’s two worlds of freedom and necessity connect When Coleridge writes disconcertingly on his first page that ‘the least of what I have written concerns me personally’, he is similarly not disowning his autobiography but initiating a critique of the ‘personal’ (in an ‘Age of personality’ he deplored) as a sufficient definition of the self, (BL I,5,41 ). His attack on Fichte as ‘hyperstoic’ alleges that Fichte is insensible to nature, formal and devoid of affect in his theology, and ethically committed to ‘mortification of the natural passions and desires’. His inadequacy is then measured in a footnoted ‘dithyrambic ode’, where he is accused of forcing a false ‘syntax’ upon the world.
I of the world’s whole Lexicon the root! Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight
The genitive and ablative to boot:
The accusative of wrong, the nom’native of right,
And in all cases the case absolute ...
In the last chapter we will consider Coleridge’s own grammar or spelling of the world. In fact, the Fichte described here sounds like a parody of Coleridge, both because of Coleridge’s worries about the possible interchangeableness of Stoic and Christian inwardness, here given satirical force, and because Coleridge himself uses an idea of language throughout Biographia Literaria as a touchstone of generosity of philosophical understanding. We have noted this also to be Schelling’s anti-scholastic concern in finding a future for Kantianism. But what might the ‘language of spirits’ supplementing that of ‘words’ have meant for Coleridge?
Schelling, as we have seen, viewed our experience as a repetition of an anterior activity whose choice thus to determine its variety also entailed a negative emotion (Leiden) at being curtailed in this way. Both positive and negative aspects of this scenario have to be registered by an adequate description of our effective historicization of Geist or Being. Hence the need for a philosophical approach less cerebral than formal ratiocination, but one whose affective expression exceeds ordinary linguistic usage. It is then significant that Coleridge, with Schelling’s Philosophische Schriften on his lap, as it were, dictates a series of attacks on bad historicism and failed repetitions in literary and philosophical practice.
A quick word on plagiarism is needed here. Coleridge frequently translates verbatim without acknowledgement in the crucial philosophical expositions of the first volume of Biographia Literaria. There is no point in disputing this: in a university he would have been hauled up before the relevant disciplinary committee. However, once we abandon the attempt to extenuate, we can still note how interesting it is that as he embarks on his major plagiarisms in Chapter 9 he considers the question of whether or not philosophy is a science. ‘I’ began to ask myself; is a system of philosophy, as different from mere history and historic classification, possible?’ (BL I,141 ). For philosophy is, in any case, in a funny disciplinary position. Complaints that philosophy hasn’t made much progress, that we shouldn’t still have to read Plato and Kant if their errors have been properly exposed and surpassed, seem beside the point. Equally unsatisfactory, though, would be to claim that philosophy, like art, is primarily of expressive value; that it will always be historically important in the way that other characteristic cultural productions are, because they articulate human concerns in an original way within their historical terms of reference. To settte for this is to ignore philosophy’s undoubted scientific interest in getting the terms of reference right Philosophers want to prove each other right or wrong; they want to correct each other’s methodologies; they change the philosophical agenda out of a desire to write more effectively. Yet all said and done, definitive conclusions escape them, no great philosophy is entirely laid to rest and we dovalue philosophies as benchmarks of the human spirit, of the nature of aspiration, of the different choices of life that we can make.
It therefore appears more appropriate to look at the way in which we historicize the perennial philosophical urge to discover the truth. And, in the case of the philosopher, Schelling, whom Coleridge felt closest to, the issue of historicization was central anyway to his philosophical understanding of the infinite productivity of Being. The local examples of historicization Coleridge criticizes begin early in the first volume of Biographia. His attack on English neoclassical verse in Chapter 1 is an attack on poor imitation; and imitation is to be understood as borrowing from past writing. When it is poor, argues Coleridge, ‘all the propriety [is] lost in the transfer’ (BL I, 20). His example is Gray’s version in “The Bard’ of Gratiano’s speech on the ‘skarfed bark’, which returns from its voyage reduced to tatters by the ‘strumpet wind’, an example that itself tells a story of historical changeability. Furthermore, bad imitation, thinks Coleridge, may be based on even less successful historicizations that take place when an English pupil is made to write Latin verses at school. Then he is ordered to follow his Gradus ad Parnassum in order to concoct verse composed of synonyms of earlier models. You look up another word for each word in the line you are imitating and pass off your own as original. Coleridge coins a new word, ‘ferrumination’, to describe the effect. The editors of Biographia Literaria point out that the examples of this practice Coleridge gives are false, which still leaves him attacking a principle: the principle that the re-animation of the past in the present takes place through synonymy (BL I, 21n.). Coleridge’s entire philosophical effort, however, of which ‘ferrumination’ is a small example, is to desynonymize words of the same meaning, and thus to participate in and abet the progress of knowledge. Desynonymy shows language growing out of itself, like Schelling’s Absolute, leaving a welter of inchoate, unspelled sound behind. Synonymy is repetition without a sense of history, without a sense of propriety. Desynonymy respects the difference necessary for a truth to reproduce itself in history, under different historical circumstances. And Coleridge’s own desyno-nymized word for this is ‘tautegory’.
Distrust of synonymy also helps explain why Coleridge sees the poetry of his own time as stereotyped – the product of indefinite variations on the same pieces of type. The French and Pope’s versions of Homer are to blame. Translation, geographically and historically understood, either authenticates or vitiates creative effort. For Coleridge, the true genius is less excited by personal concerns than by those in which origin and project displace present coincidence: ‘the man of genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still constituted by the future or the past; and because his feelings have been habitually associated with thoughts and images, to the number, clearness and vivacity of which the sensation of self is always in an inverse proportion’ (BL I, 43-4). He comes to himself via a process of translation by which he grasps his own historical agency. This sounds idealist, but other of Coleridge’s metaphors are quite materialist. Forgery rather than exchange of currency is another image of the abuse of imitation. Even then, one has the sense that for Coleridge fiscal metaphors, when applied to usage or writing, signify the reading public left to their own devices, and finding their own
level, of learning and expertise, with disastrous results. Coleridge’s attacks on the reading public, in Biographia Literaria and elsewhere, are certainly elitist, but they are also directed against the notion that the meaning of writing could ever be fixed by present reception. Critics who, in forming public opinion, try to do that betray the historical awareness that should have prevented them. They become arbitrary, just as the public opinion they help form becomes personal. General literacy for Coleridge means that ‘all men being supposed able to read, and all readers able to judge, the multitudinous PUBLIC, shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism’ (BL I, 59). To personalize is to abbreviate the origins of self in productive repetition as it was set out in the contemporary philosophy powering the thought of Biographia Literaria.
Coleridge could put up with the Edinburgh Review, he later tells us, provided it neither personalized its criticism nor brought into play historically unconnected juvenile works of the author under consideration. Knowing more than what the author’s publication suggested was, in this case, to know less because of the ‘personal’ nature of the criticism for which such information was habitually used. Coleridge’s editors note that he is quoting unacknowledged and verbatim a passage from Lessing here (BL I, 108-9). The ensuing discussion of Southey that takes up the remainder of Chapter 3 appears fairly anodyne. But, as the start of the next chapter makes clear, the critical aim is to show that there was nothing new about him. Coleridge’s historicism makes him a critic of the ‘new’ anyway; the apparent digression into considerations of the misnomer of ‘a new school of poetry’ to which Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge supposedly belonged is keyed into this larger critique. The personal criticism driven by the ‘new’ comes at the end of a process of literary decline, a series of contractions without production, synonyms without linguistic birth or future, as books fall from possessing the status of oracles to being condemned as ‘culprits’. No wonder that authors, thinks Coleridge, return the compliment to their readers, and cater for the ‘personal’ reading public. Author and reader become interchangeable, synonyms for each other, mutually abusive.
The figure Coleridge lights on to give a reductio ad absurdum for this synonymy is the ‘bull’ or pun. His example, ‘I was a fine child but they changed me’, is explained as follows:
The first conception expressed in the word ‘I’, is that of personal identity - Ego contemplans: the second expressed in the word ‘me’, is the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed. – Ego contemplatus. (BL I, 72n.)
We are close to Wordsworth’s speculations in The Prelude on feeling he was ‘two beings’. Strawson, too, writes: ‘It’s clear to me that events in my remoter past didn’t happen to me [that which I now apprehend myself to be when I’m apprehending myself specifically as an inner mental presence or self].’37 What the bull does is to vulgarize very precise and puzzling distinctions. We are connected to much of our origins through difference rather than resemblance, and the identity involved, recognized in law, for example, is not something we can consistently experience from a single, individual point of view. It is more dramatic than that. Nevertheless, the fact that we have been that other person seems irrefutable and complicates our sense of immediacy and inalienable intimacy with our present. That, too, will one day be distant and other. This fact must feature in our accounts of what it is to be us, diversifying and pluralizing the tactics of autobiography, desynonymizing ourselves, we might say. To obliterate these tensions is like making a crude pun.
‘A talent for mimicry’, writes Coleridge in the same vein in his next important footnote, ‘seems strongest where the human race are most degraded.’ Eventually this will sound similar to Coleridge’s attack on the kind of synonymy Wordsworth appeared to desire for his poetry by using ‘the real language of men’. By contrast, Coleridge, in his main text now, uses a quotation from Aristophanes’ The Progs that he thinks tells of Bacchus’ refusal of mimicry. Instead, Bacchus tries to ‘bring back the spirit of old and genuine poesy’, rather as Wordsworth aspired to do according to the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (BL I, 76 and n.). But whether or not Wordsworth succeeded is, Coleridge argues, left undecided by his critics, because they opt for the synonymy of those who ‘satirize by copying’ (thus rehearsing Wordsworth’s fault where it exists) rather than the desynonymy of those who historicize (a Wordsworthian virtue if they could only detect it). Coleridge’s own early enthusiasm for Wordsworth’s poetry is then characterized by a critical appreciation of Wordsworth’s preservation of historical difference in order to intensify his expression of present experience. That, where properly realized, must be the lyrical content of his ballads. Coleridge interposes a quotation from The Friend: ‘To find no contradiction [the kind relished in punning] in the union of old and new; to contemplate the ANCIENT of days and all his works with feelings as fresh, as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat; characterises the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help unravel it’ (BL I, 80).
Coleridge’s autobiography concerns itself with a major departure in German philosophy. British empiricism, represented by David Hartley, fails to explain how knowledge is possible; it fails to avoid ‘all the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility ... of intercommunion between substances that have no one property in common’ (BL I, 117). As Fichte thought, the activity of the mind seems to be the key to bypassing the limitations of a logic according to which the mind reflects its object in some undisclosed manner. Even self-consciousness, where subject and object are the same, opens up an infinite regress in which each self-reflection must entail a further validating reflection. If, however, Fichte means to reduce all matter to the ‘I’, and overcome the nature/mind divide in that way, then, in Coleridge’s terms, he appears to be engaging in a crude synonymizing. Schelling, on the other hand, effectively describes the subject’s continuing identity with its object as its productive diversity, as desynonymy. An original presupposition for any knowledge to be possible – Being’s contraction into identifiable objectivity – is repeated in miniature by every individual act of knowledge. The productive flair with which the larger Spirit or Being carries on its autobiography is then repeated by the tactics of the individual, such as Coleridge, in his biographical sketches of himself.
Let’s resume the argument of this chapter briefly to see where it has led. Coleridge’s autobiography is notoriously unsystematic. Its enjoyment of its own inward diversity appears to have no need of strict principles. It therefore comes closer to an episodic, Stoical versatility in response to unpredictable and often adverse circumstances than to a persevering Christian narrative. Coleridge, though, could not have agreed with the major contemporary philosophical critique of Stoicism by Hegel because Hegel happily made the transition from Stoical self-sufficiency to religious otherworldliness into part of his critique of both. Postmodern reinterpretation of Stoicism does offer an alternative to Hegelian stricture, and suggests another dimension to Coleridge’s ambition to write his works as his life. Other attacks on a dominant view that the construction of self is necessarily narrative, like Galen Strawson’s, allied to scepticism that to be able to narrate the self is a sign of goodness or psychic flourishing, support Coleridge’s autobiographical solution. Furthermore, the coincidence of Coleridge’s autobiographical practice with an autobiographical absolutism developed from Fichte to Schelling rivals Hegel’s account. The charge of political irresponsibility that Hegel had levelled at the sequence from Stoicism to the ‘unhappy consciousness’ can, in any case, be answered by a Machiavellian tradition, replete with Stoicism, that chimes with Coleridge’s own political advocacy of a class of intellectuals, the Clerisy, embedded in the community, persuading the populace, to whom they minister, by force of private conviction.
But the coincidence of the debate about the genres in which the self might be legitimately constructed with a Romantic philosophical problematic remains striking enough now for one to believe that it must have gripped Coleridge and fired his project. For, whether imagined in Hegelian narrative or Stoic episode, our mode of self-understanding determines for these philosophers just about everything else. And in the Schellingian version more congenial to Coleridge – and maybe a reason for his not continuing to read Hegel – the individual’s repetition of a dilemma of ontological awareness is not the hubris of that self-consciousness but its very possibility. The self repeats with a difference, desynonymizes; and this difference from its Being makes it socialized, articulate, viable. Yet, in a way acknowledged by so much Romantic writing the self is further assured of that functionality it has now achieved by accompanying feelings of regret or sadness or longing – Schelling’s Leiden in the Abhandlungen and Sehnsucht in the System and in German Romanticism generally. However unrealistic, this affect helps reconstruct what we cannot sensibly think, an ultimate trans-individual authentication of our individual selves; or, in Schelling’s grand metaphysical extrapolation, the understanding of the world as diverse productions from an undifferentiated unity. The requirement that the product identify its source appropriately escapes the explanatory sequence of cause and effect (except in quantum physics?), which, for post-Kantians, vitiated Kant’s related attempt to explain how the unknowable noumenal world might connect to the phenomenal world of our experience. Schelling’s post-Kantian expansion ‘completed’ Kantianism by recruiting more and more of sensibility to its philosophical purpose. Like Coleridge’s philosophical ‘friendship’, it used affect to fuel its own indirect reconstruction of metaphysical production. The existentialism that followed continued this process of the retrospective endowment of feeling – angst, care, love – with the authority for maintaining philosophical responsibility for an openness to the undifferentiated.
This tactic for getting at Being philosophically is still widely suspected of harbouring a contradictory psychologism today. The first volume of Biographia Literaria, is, it seems to me, comparably controversial. If it does write Coleridge’s metaphysics in his life, as I am suggesting, it plots the same process. Its miscellaneous, anecdotal range makes for mixed, often lively reading, and must have been engaging at the time, appearing as it did on the back of Coleridge’s success with Remorse at Drury Lane a few years before, a success that had enhanced his public standing more effectively than his intermittent popularity as a lecturer at the British Institution earlier. But it is as a pioneer of the philosophical use of affect that Biographia Literaria fits into the pattern we suggested for understanding The Friend, in its reconstructed form a near contemporary of Biographia Literaria. And that success comes from a critique of the ‘personal’ that endows autobiography with Coleridge’s characteristic and fascinating philosophical intensity.