Coleridge has long been thought of as someone who supplements dry philosophical schemes with considerations of affect. Epistemological and ethical orientations in his writings often result from his departure from original sources in order to inflect them with a recognizably personal response. Logical categories and categorical imperatives are often made to contradict their primary functions by being obliged, when Coleridge handles them, to implement strategies of relationship and love inimical to the founding purpose they possessed in their home philosophies.1 The formalism of Kantian ethics is one of Coleridge’s recurrent examples of an abstract sphere in need of emotional supplement. Earlier, we saw him argue that Fichte ‘s post-Kantian Stoicism only intensified Kant’s own Stoic, inexpressive tendency. Coleridge linked this to Fichte ‘s lack of philsophical interest in expression and communication generally. For Coleridge, as for most people, emotion is relational and social in origin. In Hegel’s Phenomenology and Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’, a consciousness devoid of relationship can only become constitutionally unhappy. Such dejection is the emotional equivalent of a solipsistic episte-mology; a state symptomatic of consciousness detached from ‘Spirit’ for Hegel, one disqualified from enjoying a satisfying individuality because of its loss of a validating community. Coleridge’s idea of friendship is arguably his own comparable but more affectively charged solution to the same problem.
Coleridge is, I suppose, thought of more as a Platonist than an Aristotelian, but in this salient and defining characteristic his thinking is more in line with the Aristotelian idea that a telos or special background is required for knowledge and moral belief to make sense. ‘Ought’ cannot be detached from ‘is’ because the affective naturalism explaining why we hold some actions to be virtuous and others not to be virtuous is only decipherable within a certain cultural map to which the overriding Kantian virtue of universalizability is too skeletal a key.2 But to this familiar framework Coleridge again adds the all-important dimension of relationship. As a post-Kantian thinker, I would like to claim, Coleridge can only function when he is able to view the connections he makes in different discourses as kinds of dramatic relationship expressive of the person knowing, as much as of the integrative process by which that person ascertains his or her knowledge. His occasional philosophical originality and his difficulties arise from this disposition. Coleridge’s idea of tautegory, which anticipates Schelling’s historicist philosophy of revelation while Schelling himself is not publishing, is also a theory of how relationships can be maintained across time and between us and our productive origins. Differences with Schelling, especially on the affective possibilities open to such relationships, should not be allowed to obscure this basic affinity of purpose and project.
But aren’t romantic poets everywhere in the business of spreading ‘relationship and love’? Coleridge’s problems and peculiar interests, though, arise when Wordsworth’s words are applied not only to the way we relate the different aspects of our experiences whose diversity and exclusive demands might otherwise unbalance or grievously narrow our perspective on the world. Coleridge would have no objection to seeing his task as to resist the monological tendency of different discourses to avoid dialogue: to ignore the fact that, despite their oppositions, such as that between science and poetry, for example, they are obliged to cohere within a single point of view, a human monad, deploying both of them, often simultaneously. Coleridge, though, takes this process of integration further by in effect claiming that such tensions inhere already within each of these distinct discourses, knowledges, politics or whatever. Intrinsic to their self-constitution must be the consideration that they belong by definition to an affective being who lives by dialogue and relationship, a being to whom any project will only belong if it reflects or expresses this defining orientation towards the response of others. Truth is one thing, according to The Friend, and the ‘reception of Truth’ is its further realization by which ‘we became what we are’.3 It would, Coleridge implies, be too parsimonious a definition of truth which regarded its affective role in human becoming as irrelevant.
A cynical view of Coleridge (and one I have often been tempted by) is that this characterization is altogether a wonderfully convenient concession to make to someone as messy as our hero. Generosity of this kind has, after all, had many precursors, sympathetic readers who see Coleridge’s refusal to submit exactly to the protocols of the discipline with whose authority he is opining as indications not of incompetence but rather of that hermeneutic ideal – to know and voice the author you are reading with a knowledge superior to the author’s own knowledge. In hermeneutics, the reception of truth can critique the truth itself, or any notion of truth divorced from its reception. Norman Fruman’s ultimately unhelpful attack on Coleridgean scholarship in the 70s did convincingly insist on one point: that Coleridgean plagiarism often involved attributing to the person from whom he was borrowing just that same plagiaristic habit he was indulging, as if calling a police officer to distract the person whose pocket you are picking. Coleridge’s rhetoric created the myth of Coleridgean reading in which he understood the author better than the author did himself or herself because Coleridge could see through claims to be an original; claims, in effect, to enjoy an isolated individuality, one undefined by relationship and reception. Visible behind pretensions to singularity was the actual series of relationships with precursors which, while invalidating notions of sole ownership, also lit up that background of relationship and personal need ensuring that the knowledge under consideration could belong to us. Without that belonging, founded on communicability, knowledge foundered.
Certainly this transparency was frequently diagnosed by Coleridge not as a window upon elective affinities between one author and another but as a glass through which he detected borrowings meriting the strictures that subsequent critics have then applied to him.4 Genial coincidences and divine ventriloquism prevail less often with Coleridge than the kind of verdict he pronounced on Sir James Mackintosh’s lectures – ‘a wretched patchwork of plagiarisms from Condillac.’5 But the antagonistic idiom, encouraged it has to be said by Coleridge himself, and taken up by his critics, obscures the other idiom of relationship and its significance to his view of understanding. Writing to Southey at a typically exciting and vulnerable moment of his philosophical career, Coleridge criticizes the associationist system of David Hartley ( Observations on Man) that he is in the process of claiming to have surpassed, or convincing himself that he has surpassed, because: ‘Believe me, Southey! A metaphysical Solution, that does not instantly tell for something in the Heart, is grievously to be suspected as apocry[p]hal.’6 Coleridge’s choice of the word ‘apocryphal’ is arresting. He doesn’t say that the philosophy which makes no affective impression is mechanical, or soulless, or un-poetic, as he does on many other occasions. He says that, on its own terms, it is unclear. It tells us nothing. It hides any possible justification it might have. The heardess metaphysical solution will remain obscure, or have an essentially cryptic meaning beyond our ken, beyond, that is, what is legitimately revealed to us. Unless the sympathetic chord is struck, the philosophizing will remain internally incoherent, and the best we can do for it is postulate an explanation elsewhere, in a hidden place to which it does not and may never, short of apocalyptic happenings, give us access. The heart, in (dare one say it, given The Friends stern words on Rousseau) Rousseauistic fashion, contributes towards transparency, cutting through a potentially abstruse discussion to ensure that communication is achieved. Coleridge’s target is not, no doubt, those so-called civilized departures from the natural state which are Rousseau’s targets. Nevertheless, Coleridge is insisting that knowledge which is not communicable is nonsense, and that communicability depends not on the impersonal transmission of ciphers but on the affective resolution of information for a naturally relational being.
Communication for Coleridge the philosopher became particularly difficult for him when he changed theoretical idioms from, roughly, the Dissenting radical tradition into which British empiricism after Hume had fallen – the tradition of Hartley, Priestley and Godwin, laced with the common-sense philosophy of Hume’s British opponents – into a German idiom7 This change of idiom was of course itself complicated by Coleridge’s lasting commitment to Christianity, and, as Coleridge’s remark to Southey revealed, to the models of God’s communications to us – revelation embedded within Christian theology. It is, however, within the new German idiom that Coleridge’s major philosophical initiative within the history of British philosophy is most persuasively claimed to have taken place. J.H. Muirhead, an early and indefatigable champion of this view, saw him ‘as a stage in the development of a national form of idealistic philosophy ... the voluntaristic form of idealist philosophy, of which Coleridge was the founder, and remains today the most distinguished representative’. Coleridge, he maintains, substituted a ‘personalistic metaphysics ... for the pantheistic impersonalism of Schelling’.8
Philosophically speaking, the voluntarism of Coleridge’s idealism is a twisting away from Schelling, not a parroting of him. Like his modifications of Kantian ethics, his departure is once more intended to map a model of relationship, and so of communication, on to Schelling’s Absolute grounding of knowledge. He transformed the Absolute ground of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) and Naturphilosophie generally into an activity demanding a personal response in order to ensure that its knowledge had been communicated to us and thus legitimated as knowledge. Theological implications, one might say, were a welcome bonus, but Coleridge must have thought philosophical requirements by themselves justified his search for relationship. Schelling did end up producing an exhaustive philosophy of revelation, but even there, and certainly on the way there in the Freedom essay and the Weltalter (Ages of the World), the convergence of his Absolute with a divine indifference is different from Coleridge’s God. Schelling’s God evolves out of a formless priority, one rotating obsessively upon itself. To escape this frustration, it contracts into existence (every pun intended) to gain identity in nature and history and so, as Logos, to render these categories legible at the same time. But, crucially, this God remains simultaneously unconditioned, and so unsusceptible of the kind of relationship Coleridge wants. As Schelling puts it in the Weltalter, ‘the unconditioned is indeed both being [undifferentiated] and what-is [the particulars of nature and the stages of history]. But not as that which is both being and what-is .. .’9 It cannot be the something it would have to be for us to be able to relate to it. If it were, it would become differentiated, and so conditioned, losing the Absolute character from which it arose. If we participate in it, like to like, as Schelling’s Freedom essay seems to want, this freedom is precisely freedom from the differential, relational knowledge necessary for identity. And it is ‘identity philosophy’ which Schelling’s ‘positive’ philosophy of the Absolute complements.10 Like the Unconscious, the Absolute can be articulate in every particular instance of nature and history, truly revelatory, something positive, while remaining undifferentiated, never graspable on its own terms. Arguably, this is the elusive habit of Schelling’s philosophy at all stages of his long career. As Karl Jaspers puts it: ‘Schelling sketched systems, but he always thought what was not contained in these systems’.11
Schelling’s need to understand the world as revealed signals the ‘fall’ measuring our distance from God; it also furnishes the means of our salvation. Salvation, though, is not achieved by undoing God’s manifest being and returning, impossibly, to his grounding indifference. Such unravelling, the Freedom essay makes clear, exemplifies evil. Instead we must unpack more liberally the notion of revelation. We become fulfilled in making ourselves the recipients of God’s communication of himself in the fittingness of his chosen world to our best selves. The languages of this compatibility or sense of proper orientation are many – aesthetic, moral, religious, historical. They handle the excess Schelling seems obliged to think beyond the jurisdiction of whatever systematic sketch he has in hand. They are certainly not exclusively Christian, nor Platonic, more Wittgensteinian in their philosophical assumption of the role of saying what it is that philosophy itself may show but cannot say at any particular moment. Here is a major difference between Schelling and Coleridge. In both, the quality of relationship is what legitimates the comprehensiveness of our knowledge of the world. But crucial for Coleridge is the personal, affective quality of such relationship, expressed in the caring love of a Deity who has ‘saved’ us or some suchlike thing. For Schelling, it is the variety of our attachment, pre-conceptual as well as conceptual, to a world that might have been totally different, which it is the function of God to underwrite. Relationship facilitates acquaintance without invoking an acquaintance or person, as Coleridge does.
Schelling’s ingenuity in getting his Absolute/God to slip differentiation while remaining positive ensures its historical mobility as well. The contracting of God into the world has no timing. ‘Time begins perpetually’, as Coleridge’s marginal note to Jacobi’s treatise on Spinoza has it.12 As the ground of the world, it can only reveal what has always been the case since nothing can happen without its grounding. We can never, that is, get at the notion of God other than through material revelation, but that revelation, to be revelation, belongs elsewhere and has always happened. Yet it is only as revelation that the world is intelligible. It cannot as a subject master itself as object, nor as object can it contain a subject which knows it for what it is. Schelling’s God takes off from that conundrum. Recent re-readings or revivals of Schelling, from those of Manfred Frank to Slavoj Žižek’s, have taken the unidentifiable but inseparable unity of spirit and matter (subject and object) as anticipatory of subsequent materialisms.13 Subject rather than object loses out in this scenario. In these readings of him, Schelling sets out the beginnings of Marxist or Lacanian dialectics. Our loss of individuality in the attempt to define ourselves refers us back to forces of production indifferent to that opposition of subject and object on which our individuality depends. And any process so careful to avoid intentionality, whose left hand (ground, being) must above all not know what its right hand (the grounded, what-is, nature, history) is doing, would seem to favour explanation of human freedom and nature through an overall instrumentalism which elevates (rather than reduces) us to material existence.
Coleridge criticizes Spinoza because he ‘saw God in the ground only and ... not likewise in his moral, intellectual, existential and personal Godhead’.14 Clearly the criticism of Spinoza would have to be modified to take account of the greater elusiveness of Schelling’s God, a God who exists neither as ground nor as person but as their undifferentiated identity. Sometimes, indeed, in his eagerness to excuse God the relationship so essential to Coleridge’s thinking, Schelling in the Weltalter seems to subordinate God to his own process, so that even if we for a second caught his presence we still would miss his point. Again, the thinking here is similar to (and perhaps more accessible to us through) Freud, Bataille and Lacan. Just as our idea of the completion of ourselves, that state in which we had nothing left to will, would result in stasis, or the death figured in erotic satisfaction, or in an annihilating identification with the real or authenticity, so a God grasped ‘in the will that wills nothing ... is neither this nor that, neither good nor evil, neither what-is nor being, neither affection nor aversion, neither love nor wrath, and yet the strength to be all of them’.15 Žižek again sees a psychoanalytic parallel, when the subject is cured by recognizing the typicality rather than the individuality of the forces producing him, and, as a result ‘freely assumes his own non-existence’.16 By contrast, he also, somewhat tartly, demystifies the Schellingian indifference, comparing it to the current recoveries of authenticity consequent on the breakdown of nation states under the effect of globalism. One way of explaining why fierce ethnic nationalisms rather than a benevolent cosmopolitanism may result from the latest shape of capitalism is on this model of a recovery of what one always already was. And when a social group chooses, contracts into, its ‘eternal nature’, the ensuing revelation of absolute authenticity can be murderous for those who (scandalous impossibility) do not share it, or who proclaim their own authenticity.
It is worth getting involved in Schellingian complexities in order to see more sharply why the problem of Schelling for Coleridge is not just the problem of pantheism, as has usually been claimed. In any case, pantheism is a charge hard to press upon Spinoza, never mind Schelling. Panentheism is more plausible, but in fact it is easier to see Coleridge’s unproven theological opposition to this tradition, which turns Spinoza’s first cause into an Absolute grounding, as an opposition to panentheism’s avoidance of relationship. As a result it was easier for Coleridge to distort Kantian philosophical architecture to suit his purposes than to advance very far into Schelling’s scheme. Practical reason must become cognitive, and noumena or things-in-themselves must be acquaintable through this enhanced practical reason. ‘The Practical Reason alone is Reason in the full and substantial sense’: this is perhaps the foundational statement of Aids to Reflection.17 If we think of the Absolute as itself practical, as a will, then, contra Schelling’s will that wills nothing, we can identify with its purposes. We can, that is, enter into a relationship with God. And God’s purposes are set out, as far as Coleridge is concerned, in the precepts of Christianity, God’s definitive revelation to humankind. Ergo we can identify our practical reason with God’s Practical Reason once we have stepped inside the ideological circle of Christiantity. Sometimes Coleridge gives the impression that the speculative freedoms carved out by Schelling’s philosophy have been abandoned. ‘Christianity’, Coleridge famously wrote in Aids to Reflection, ‘is not a Theory, or a Speculation: but a Life, – not a Philosophy of Life, but a life and a living Process.’18 But rather than a straight contradiction of his philosophical drive towards relationship, I think Coleridge’s emphasis here is on the fact that once the relational success of divine knowledge has been established, that divine knowledge is so irradiated by our affective life that its logical justifications and philosophical origins no longer furnish its idiomatic expression. The theoretical and speculative criteria haven’t disappeared, rather their success is no longer to have to appear dominant. I don’t find this convincing but I believe it is what Coleridge thought. Coleridge could have approved Schelling’s philosophy of revelation, for, among other things, its use of feeling – especially if he contrasted it with Fichte ‘s severely cerebral Critique of all Revelation. A repetition of God’s plenitude we cannot get on terms with in any other way, revelation requires an affective response. We saw though, in Chapter 2, how Schelling believed this apprehension was being enriched in the way that our self-consciousness is by the pressure of the unconscious from which it has differentiated itself. It can do so in all sorts of expressions of belonging or nostalgia. However, the direct, Coleridgean personal relationship is obviously forbidden us where the power productive of or anterior to personality is concerned.
When Coleridge did encounter a genuine Pantheism, his criticism is again expressed as an inability to make sense of particulars that are supposedly irradiated with a purpose, but that remain objects with which he cannot create a sensible relationship. Either they don’t communicate anything, or else what they communicate owes nothing to their communication of it – both meaningless positions in Coleridge’s view. I am thinking especially of his criticism of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and his ‘Immortality Ode’ (‘Ode: Intimations ...’) in Biographia Literaria. I will return to this. The general point to be extracted at this stage, though, is one about Coleridge’s situation in the history of philosophy. He was fortunate enough to be born at a time when German philosophy had been forced to solve the problem of defining the unconditioned object of philosophical knowledge or certainty by positing a primal unity in which neither subject nor object were separated. This Absolute grounding – transcendental Ego in Fichte, Being in the young Hölderlin, Absolute Will in the later Schelling – must necessarily lose the individualizing character of knowledge it is there to explain. For Coleridge, such trans-subjective and ontological impersonality is only tolerable when he can focus it within his Christianity as a Providential Will. Out of Christian focus, it appears rather as a kind of Pantheism, a subtending significance beyond relationship altogether because prior to the individualizing dynamic it explains. Nevertheless, personalized, this grounding essential to the post-Kantian tradition obviously lent to theism an extraordinary philosophical resonance and authority. Coleridge often seems torn between the desire unscrupulously to annex the philosophical Absolute so advantageous for authorizing Christian theism, and his recognition that there is nothing inherendy theistic in the exposition of subject and object by a unity prior to both. He tries to cover this conflict with a supervening insistence on the relational quality of all knowledge, including, per impossibile, Absolute knowledge. Hence, paradoxically, the ground out of which relations are constructed must itself be in relation to us for it to make sense on Coleridge’s affective criteria. All the post-Kantian attempts to eschew relationship in order properly to explain it go by the board.
Like Coleridge, J.H. Muirhead was an advocate of German philosophy in Britain at a time when Britain was not receptive to this tradition. In Coleridge’s case, this arose from the novelty, uncompromising confidence and initial strangeness of a philosophical impulse, the texture and consistency of whose address to philosophical questions was to prove of extraordinary endurance and contemporaneity. Muirhead was competing with anti-German feeling during and after the First World War.19 The exigencies to which such cultural hostility drove the translator and assimilator were therefore well appreciated by him. Coleridge once asserted that ‘to be with me for any continuance and in any bond of sympathy, and not to feel attached to Germans, and to prize the intellectual Growth of Protestant Germany, is scarcely possible’.20 The untidiness of his use of German philosophical traditions should not obscure this commitment. Coleridge does try to assimilate supposed discoveries within the German intellectual idiom to positions held earlier in English neo-Platonic thinking, ostensibly undermining German originality in the process. He looks everywhere, as I have said, for relationship between any apparently monolithic intellectual achievement and other thinkers, not least himself. But he never underestimates the impact of the movement stemming from Kant, whose philosophy seized him with ‘a Giant’s hand’.
The Protestant character he attributes here to his abiding German attachment is symptomatic of Coleridge’s take on philosophical problems. He is interested in any philosophy’s amenability to or compatibility with the scheme of revelation essential to his Christianity. The macrocosmic model of communication thereby tabled in his philosophical discussions is then matched by an insistence on relationship on the microcosmic level, the level of linguistic usage, of metaphor and symbol. When the limits of his sympathy for Schelling are conveyed through opposition to Schelling’s supposed Catholicism, Coleridge’s opposition is working on the macro-level, referring to disagreements with Schelling’s overall explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Obviously, still keeping at a very general level of discussion, the fundamental fore-understanding or prejudgement of such Protestant opposition is that Catholicism underestimates the importance of a personal relationship with God unmediated by ecclesiastical institutions. That fairly stereotypical dissent from Catholicism then paves the way in Coleridge’s ‘Note on Spinoza’ for his attack on the abstraction of a notion of God he believes shared by Schelling and Spinoza. Lodged in Spinoza’s ‘reverential belief of the infinite transcendency of the divine Wisdom to all finite perfections’ is the unfocusable ‘infinity of attributes’ of Spinoza’s God which we have seen Schelling translate into his own idiom to safeguard God from particularization or differentiation. In the ‘Note’, pantheism is virtually dismissed as an irrelevancy or at best only a means of approaching Coleridge’s central preoccupation with the communicability of knowledge, including the communication of its grounding in an Absolute or God.
On the microcosmic level, we can see the same preoccupation driving the discussion of Pantheism in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ found in Biographia Literaria. In this case, Coleridge’s lament for the lack of relationship betrays not his religious or epistemological predisposition but his political fundamentals. Wordsworth, he complains, loses his subject. The overarching pantheistic scheme results in an indifference as to which symbol, or choice of symbol, might represent it in the poem. The ‘child philosopher’ of the Ode is implausible as a representative of ‘Spirit’, pretending to an authority it could only possess in a democracy beyond Coleridge’s political sympathies. Pantheism, especially in the German tradition, often worked hand in hand with a political radicalism opposed to the vested interests it saw in any clerical class or ecclesia. Pantheism made God available to all and sundry who had the wit to see him. ‘Spinoza and the radical Reformation’ is the grouping Frederick Beiser thinks characteristic of the dissident impulse in the early German Romanticism of Schleiermacher, the Schlegels and Novalis, an energy Coleridge would have increasingly tried to stem, and to which his famous use of Jakob Boehme makes no allusion.21 And again the logic of his condemnation would be to deplore what he understood as a breakdown in communication caused by the failure of relationship.
Contrary to Blake’s vision, for whom particulars of any kind might be irradiated with divine purpose, Coleridge’s understanding of relationship is hierarchical. He is quite explicit about this in the Biographia’s criticism of Wordsworth. Wordsworth plays around with traditional expectations of rank; he mentions them in Lyrical Ballads and elsewhere only to highlight their irrelevance ‘where nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate’.22 In Blake’s Jerusalem, we encounter ‘All Human Forms identified even Tree, Metal Earth and Stone’, a welcoming of precisely that lack of differentiation between subject and object that Coleridge took to be disabling when he asked of Wordsworth’s ‘child philosopher’ in the ‘Immortality Ode’, ‘In what sense can the magnificent attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or a field of corn, or even to a ship or to the winds and waves that propel it?’ (BL II,140). Expressing the ground prior to the distinction between human and other, Wordsworth implies a society so egalitarian that its members, in Coleridge’s view, are constitutionally unconnected, incapable either of relating to or communicating with each other. He puts to one side the fact that it was exactly such an undifferentiated state it was the ambition of his own post-Kantian philosophy to articulate. (We will revisit this conundrum in the last chapter.) And he uses the inappropriateness of the Absolute to participate in the relational knowledge it was meant to ground as a refutation of ideas of radical democracy. Microcosmic Pantheism makes no more sense to Coleridge than macrocosmic Pantheism. It permits infinite exchanges and substitutions as God indifferently imbues everything and anything with his significance; we are compelled to the conclusion in Blake’s Thel that ‘Everything that lives is holy’. As a result, in Coleridge’s critique, substitutability replaces relationship, and society becomes meaningless. Where all things are equally meaningful, meaning loses definition.
Wordsworth’s poetry raises the spectre of the atheistic non-relational Absolute which philosophically inspired and shadows Coleridge’s providential schemes. It is not surprising that in response to this recurrent threat, Coleridge insists on the primacy of communication in philosophy, an insistence that overrides the deficiencies in his exposition of the German schemes from which he borrows. Biographia Literaria is carried forward by communicative initatives on several fronts. The notorious letter from a bemused reader cautioning a more accessible style invents a relationship within a monologic discourse with a shamelessness recalling Tristram Shandy. I have argued elsewhere that the two volumes are in any case soldered together by Coleridge’s devotion to desynonymy, or a dynamic crossing the subject-object divide to impel progress through the continual individualizing of life and meaning. Finally, the second volume ends with a Trinitarian exposition of the Logos, in which Absolute ground (‘the great I AM’), its incarnation as subject (‘the filial WORD’) and as comforting object (the universe’s ‘choral echo’) sit, of course, in relation to each other, between them composing the orthodox picture of God’s personhood. In any case, the composition of Biographia Literaria is surrounded by Coleridge’s work on the ‘rifacciamento’ of The Friend, a revival whose tide mirrors its repetitive insistence on the importance of a definition of truth not confined to accuracy but incorporating all the moral considerations incumbent on sincere and effective communication. Critics have noted that The Friend can appear to say more on the subject of its desired readership than on the subjects with which it is supposed to entertain that readership.23
In the philosophical literature, the idea of friendship puts to the fore concerns preoccupying Coleridge in his own long essay in the genre. We may claim to understand someone better because she happens to be a friend of ours, but Coleridge wants methodically to be friends with his readers in order to understand them better. In this ambition he has the backing of discussions extending from Plato’s Lysis, Aristole’s Nicomachaean Ethics, Cicero’s De Amicitia through to Blanchot’s L’amitié and Derrida’s Politiques de l’amitié. In the Aristotelian tradition, friendship can only exist between virtuous persons. In friendship, I like someone for their own sake. For Aristotle, this amounts to liking them for that telos the properly governed individual shares with other human beings. Friendship with this virtuous individual even directs attention towards our common telos in salutary fashion. ‘The decent person’, therefore, ‘is related to his friend as he is to himself, since the friend is another himself.’24 Friendliness, though, informs this relation from the start with that whole-heartedness Coleridge found lacking in, say, the Kantian take on a human universal through a categorical imperative. Friendship sets certain standards of behaviour – truthfulness, helpfulness, openness and so forth – but its pleasures also facilitate the performance of these obligations. A Stoic contempt for feeling (as distinguished from a neo-Stoical deployment of intensities such as Deleuze’s) misses the philosophical significance of affect, and thus curtails itself philosophically.
Coleridge is interested in the specific case of truthfulness. In The Friend he distinguishes between ‘verbal truth’, based solely on accuracy, and, following Spinoza, what he calls an ‘adequate notion’ of truth, responsive to an entire moral dimension which merely ‘verbal truth’ may omit. The conveying of truth based entirely on expediency and sympathy can result in the ‘pious frauds’ reprobated by Coleridge with the same force that he repudiates a view of truth solely owing to ‘accuracy’. Neither is ‘adequate’.25 Spinoza defines an ‘adequate idea’ as one which clarifies our ‘common notions’, releasing us from confusion and so contributing to that ‘happiness’ promoted by the correct functioning of the human intellect. Happiness thus gained creates the moral dimension that allows him to characterize his philosophy as an ‘Ethics’.26 Coleridge, therefore, can find support in Aristotle and Spinoza for a view of friendship as that reciprocal liking for the idea of humanity in another, an idea clarified and attaining adequacy through the mutual pleasure involved. In friendship, it is relationship which permits access to the trans-subjective truth the post-Kantians had felt obliged to position anterior to relationship altogether. Once his communicative premise is established in The Friend, Coleridge can make a striking transition from his own work into Wordsworth’s poetry, the relationship that his criticism in Biographia Literaria had precluded. He elevates the following passage from the footnote to which it was consigned in August 1809 to the main body of the text in 1818.
Men are ungrateful to others only when they have ceased to look back on their former selves with joy and tenderness. They exist in fragments. Annihilated as to the Past, they are dead to the Future, or seek for the proofs of it everywhere, only not (where alone they can be found) in themselves. A contemporary Poet has exprest and illustrated this sentiment with equal fineness of thought and tenderness of feeling:
My heart leaps up when I behold
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So let it be, when I grow old,
Or let me die.
The Child is Father of the Man,
And I would wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.27
Relationship appears preserved at all stages of this composite passage. Self and other, self and past, and even the production of self through time define each other oppositionally through a kind of religious affection and friendship. To Coleridge, these relations seem necessary for human flourishing, and friendship is what keeps their symbiosis healthy. The biographical facts of Coleridge’s relationship with Wordsworth also emphasize the friendliness belonging to his use of this quotation, epigraph to the ‘Immortality Ode’, which must have intended some amends after the criticism of the Pantheism of the ode itself in Biographia.
In this kind of initiative, I would argue, lies the rationale of Coleridge’s ‘rifac-ciamento’ of philosophy, to be understood concomitantly with his reworking of The Friend. The Quakerish tide links with Coleridge’s Dissenting past (and his continuing approval in The Friend of the Quaker Thomas Clarkson’s energetic activism against the slave trade). It also ensures the friendly relationship of that past with his present philosophical concerns, as if anticipating the charges of apostasy levelled at his transcendentalism from Hazlitt to McGann. As well as Biographia Literaria, Coleridge had written his contributions to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana just before his remaking of The Friend, and these find their way into the ‘Essays on the Principles of Method’ at the end of the ‘rifacciamento’. These essays are rooted in his new philosophical interests and stress the primacy of practical reason – ‘all true reality has its ground and its evidence in the will – and are couched in a post-Kantian idiom in The Friend (I, 520). Coleridge was worried enough about misinterpretation of his philosophical orientation to send ‘friends’ (as editor Barbara Rooke unselfconsciously calls them) a proposed addition explaining his differences from Pantheism. In his justificatory letter he simply asserts the conglomerate into which his religious commitment turned the Absolute:
the living and personal God, whose Power indeed is the Ground of all Being, even as his will is the efficient, his Wisdom the instrumental, and his Love the final, Cause of all Existence, but who may not without fearful error be identified with the universe, or the universe to be considered an attribute of his Deity.28
Spinozistic ‘cause’ and post-Kantian ‘ground’ are interchangeable here. In Coleridge’s rhapsody they are forced into equivalence with the relational, personal God he contradictorily invokes, its relational constitution to be confirmed a few lines later in the letter by his assertion of a Trinitarianism mysteriously traceable back before the Incarnation to the time of the patriarchs.29 Thomas Allsop’s copy of The Friend is annotated at this point, when Coleridge felt vulnerable to charges of Pantheism, with an appeal to the reader’s friendship. The appeal to friendship once more unites self-knowledge gained from memory with attraction to the friend for his friendship’s reminder of just such illumination. On the basis of this relationship, Coleridge can then safely ascend to an apprehension of the Absolute Will, a notion too often elusive but here lodged feelingly in the experience of the ‘heart’:
O Youthful Reader! (for such the Friend dares anticipate) thou, that in my mind’s eye standest beside me, like my own Youth! Fresh and keen ... as is the Morning Hunter in the pursuit of Truth, glad and restless in the feeling of mental growth, O learn early, that if the Head be the Light of the Heart, the Heart is the Life of the Head; yea that Consciousness itself, that Consciousness of which all reasoning is the varied modification, is but the Reflex of the Conscience, when most luminous, and too often a fatuous vapour, a warmthless bewildering Mockery of Light exhaled from its corruption or stagnation. (The Friend, I, 523n.)
Coleridge’s essays in friendship composing The Friend appear intended to allow him access to trans-subjective groundings in post-Kantian thought otherwise lying too close to an impersonal Pantheism or expounding a logic owing nothing to theism at all. Relationship and communication with friends extend our understanding of relationship and communication themselves. In friendship we move beyond the personal and into realms of universal value, a departure still conspicuously owing everything to the basis in personal encounter which inspired its attempt to communicate an ‘adequate’ idea of the truth. Coleridge’s philosophy of friendship corroborates his other efforts to swamp the post-Kantian idiom he found unavoidable with a theory of communication harnessing his sensitivity to language and preserving his Christian commitments.
One might end, though, by pointing out difficulties suggesting, perhaps, the next stage in an enquiry into friendship and its use in Coleridge’s ‘rifacciamento’. For Kant, in a (little known) lecture on friendship, friendship is an Idea, unlikely ever to be instantiated, but the true measure of an effective politics – or, perhaps sharing Aristotle’s view that the justice of friendship renders politics redundant; friendship raises the idea of a society in which self-interest and the care of others perfectly counterbalance each other. Derrida, in his recent book, Politics of Friendship, is of course fascinated by this instability, in which the Idea, because ideal, gives the rule to its own impossibility. Blanchot had already updated the Aristotelian mechanics of friendship by making the common essentials (chose d’essentiel) we recognize in our friend a kind of indeterminacy which, in postmodernity, has replaced confident belief in a human telos or project of enlightenment. As in Schelling, what grounds our shared identity (and to which the discretion of friendship must be adequate) escapes discussion, history, theme, and is, ultimately, indifferent In friendship we write ‘for’ someone, in the sense of envisaging him or her as our audience, not ‘for’ them in the sense of putting words into their mouths, a presumption requiring a determinate knowledge of them escaping our knowledge of ourselves. Blanchot’s friendship is a kind of identity of indiscernibles.30
Derrida, too, pushes to their limits the implications of an impersonal standard found in friendship. He develops a remark of Cicero’s on the posthumous validation of friendship: friendship vindicated absolutely in funereal memory and commemoration confirms the paradigmatic (and thus everlasting) status achieved by the friend, the model of ourselves internalized by us, his friends, the survivors, his mourners. Which is Derrida’s version of that Schellingian quiescent will, the will that wills nothing, our self (you’ll remember) fatally completed both in its origin and in what Derrida calls an ‘absolute future’, one grounded (here, literally grounded, in the grave) in a process exceeding its individuation.31 Coleridge would have had nightmares reading Derrida’s book and watching friendship settle upon an indecideability annulling individuality in the very assertion of relationship, effacing personality through a logic as calculatedly elusive as that of Schelling’s Weltalter. It was this logic which Coleridge had taken the relational mode of friendship’s accession to the trans-subjective to displace.
Of course Schelling’s idiom is not Derrida’s, but philosophers have recently argued for the value of seeing them to be in dispute. Derrida is very taken by the way in which friendship can ‘found and destabilize... perhaps all oppositions’.32 As one might expect, the deconstruction of relationship that friendship offers Derrida discloses not an Absolute ground or indifference, but the irreducible play of differences, not the Unconditioned but the rendering of every meaning conditional upon another. It is then a moot question (more a Deleuzean question maybe) whether or not an idea of the same or the unconditioned can be taken within a differential system which appears to require that at least this opposition remain intact for difference to be different from something – the belief of Schelling’s identity philosophy. In both cases, that of Absolute identity and that of all-consuming difference, the effect would still be the one which Coleridge deplored: the redundancy of relationship to explanations of meaning. The consequence he laments belongs equally to explanations which rely on grounding anterior to relationship (as in Schelling), and to explanations which rely on the infinite substitutability of relationship (as in Derrida). Derrida is repeatedly drawn to the persistence of affect in circumstances where relationship seems impossible. His typically postmodern ethic thus strikingly and definitively reverses Coleridge’s attempt at the limits of Romantic herme-neutics, to reform circumstance to meet the needs of affect.33