The infant follows its mother’s face as, glowing with love and dreaming protection, it is raised heavenward, and with the word ‘GOD’ it combines in feeling whatever there is of reality in the warm touch, in the supporting grasp, in the glorious countenance. The whole problem of existence is present as a sum total in the mother: the mother exists as a One & indivisible something before the outlines of her different limbs and features have been distinguished by the fixed and yet half-vacant eye; and hence through each degree of dawning light the whole remains antecedent to the parts, not as composed of them but as their ground and proper meaning ... <no> otherwise than as the word or sentence to the single letters ... which ... occur in its spelling. Let it not be deemed trifling or ludicrous if I say that our modern philosophy is spelling throughout, and its lessons as strange ... as the assertion is to a child when he is first told than [sic] A B is ab, or W H O is who. Be this, however, as it may, yet for the infant the mother contains his own self, and the whole problem of existence as a whole; and the word ‘GOD’ is the first and one solution of the problem. Ask you, what is its meaning for the child? [ie the meaning of ‘God’]? Even this: ‘the something, to which my [mother] looks up’ (OM, 131).
J.G. Hamann, arguably post-Kantian avant la lettre, thought that poetry was the mother tongue of the human race. Coleridge here connects mothering and language even more closely in order, like Hamann contra Kant, to describe a primary articulation which any abstract thought must assume. The main editor of the Opus Maximum, Thomas McFarland, emphasizes the psychoanalytical implications in the density of Coleridge’s extraordinary passage, impossible for a modern reader to ignore. But Coleridge’s push towards Trinitarianism bids to explain rather than be explained by psychoanalysis. The passage tries to implicate the God-term essential to Coleridge’s theism in the process by which we come to have any identity at all. We saw that in the first part of his Phenomenology, Hegel was to make the self – other dialectic central to his explanation of the largest process conceivable, the movement of the Absolute or Geist. He uses our inner familiarity with the formal structure of self-development to make intelligible the abstractions of history and progress. Here Coleridge, like Schelling, works in the opposite direction, although he arguably arrives at this philosophical moment by writing in a sequence that can be read as following the path from the first to the second part of Hegel’s Phenomenology. In other words Coleridge by now constantly personalizes philosophical argument, while Hegel first of all philosophizes the dynamic of personal relationship.
We have already observed that Schelling in his Stuttgart Seminars of 1810, similarly to Coleridge, uses our complex emergence as persons from an unconscious state as a model for the self-disclosure of ‘God’ or the ‘Absolute’ or ‘Being’. This equation humanizes theology, as the God-term is understood through a kind of psychoanalysis. Conversely, psychoanalysis translates into a philosophy of revelation. While this symmetry initially sounds like mystification or obfuscation, in fact it lets us project the uncertainties of introspection onto a wider, more visible screen. We understand ourselves by mytholo-gizing ourselves in larger characters. Schelling revitalizes religious language by making it a living, dramatic mythology, a tautegory, and simultaneously increases the vocabulary with which we can trace our elusive subjectivity. He senses the problem of adequately expressing this philosophical moment and explicitly strives to say things in expressions of a more ‘colloquial and discursive’ (Pfau’s clever translation of Ausdrücken, auf allgemein menschliche Art) kind.1 Schelling uses ‘God’, ‘Being’ and ‘Absolute’ interchangeably, which he thinks makes him ultimately a philosopher and not a theologian who ‘abstracts’ from philosophy.2 But, from the Freedom essay through the Seminars to the Weltalter, Schelling shows that we understand how to impute responsibility to the character that determines our personality analogously with the larger picture of God’s free acceptance of limitation. Both are reciprocally illustrative revelations. Revelation, then, is the retrospective exhibition of an inchoate freedom whose current contracted, restricted form is necessary for it to have been exercised. This becomes the doubled subject (human and Absolute) of Schelling’s later ‘positive’ philosophy.3
Coleridge too is far from presuming on or prioritizing an inner acquaintance with ourselves. For Hegel, in the first part of the Phenomenology, we do have privileged access to the process by which we build on reflections of ourselves, seen in the responses we excite in others, to enlarge our sense of identity. We can use our inner, inalienable experience of this dynamic to grasp the progressive construction of the ultimate identity of Reason. Eventually, though, this confidence disintegrates in the complex self-baffling of the ‘unhappy Consciousness’, and Hegel’s argument goes into reverse, arguing from public to private knowledge. Coleridge, in tune with this turnaround, suggests we need any help we can get in understanding the complexity of the inner life. The exigencies of his autobiography demonstrate that fact if nothing else, as, like Schelling, he looks for ‘colloquial’ help from outside the strict philosophical terminology dominating the latter stages of Volume One. It is not often realized that, in departing from his plagiarized Schelling in this way, he is still like Schelling in confronting the problem of expressing philosophical insight. He manufactures that ‘inner art of discussion’ (Unterredungskunst) which Schelling thought ‘the proper secret of the philosopher’. (In Chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria Coleridge notoriously creates a dialogue with an invented reader through which his discourse and delivery of imagination changes.)4 Introspection does not reveal an unproblematic given: an interiority from whose workings we can then extrapolate to explain larger processes. Rather, we advance into the abyss of ourselves enlisting whatever available guides to coherence we have discovered or inherited from the public world. The second part of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which individual identity is dictated by Spirit, realigns itself with this explanatory pattern. In fact, Coleridge happily begins with a map of ultimate identity as his guide to understanding personal identity. His arguments work to intensify our sense of our personal, inner selves through their convergence with the divine personeity argued for by his theology. According to the passage above, in the mother is present ‘the whole problem of existence ... as a sum total’ for the child because she grounds things for him in the way God grounds everything else. Like the child following the face of the mother described here, we look up, and in looking up find conferred on that movement the meaning of a relationship. Something grasped on the model of divine intercession precedes and facilitates the emergence of the child’s sense of self. Startlingly, the name of the Deity is on Coleridge’s child’s lips as consciousness dawns.
Coleridge sounds like Schelling’s opponent, F.H. Jacobi here; specifically, his thinking recalls a remark Jacobi made early on in his attempt to revive the Pantheismusstreit in controversy with Schelling. In Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihren Offenbarung, Jacobi asserts that ‘For what typifies man’s mind (der Geist des Menschen) is that he knows God; that he perceives him, divines the hidden in nature, examines it in his breast, worships it in his heart. That is [the meaning of] his Reason, that the being (Dasein) of God is more revealed and more certain to him than his own.’5 Jacobi similarly prioritizes a divine apprehension over the process of self-knowledge, and makes this order of things constitutive of what it is to be human. Jacobi’s justifications of this claim, though, are always in terms of a faculty, whether neglected by others or discovered by him, a ‘feeling’ (Gefuhl) that precedes proof or demonstration and, indeed, seems to be a condition of the possibility of subsequent ratiocination. There are some similarities here with Schelling’s identity philosophy, where a continuity between opposites has to be assumed for differentiation to be possible. Jacobi’s theological version vigorously personalizes this identity and makes the faculty apprehending it one of religious belief – immediate, intuitive, incorrigible. For Coleridge, though, like Schelling, revelation is always much more of a process in which subsequent human witness to a divine origin is part of what divinity is. And, blanched of theological colouring, the shared thought is that the freedom lying behind the determined world we actually experience is only grasped by understanding in its present, contracted form from which can be inferred and repeated (if we accept rather than wantonly undo it) the worldly resolution of that original freedom.
So, in this passage, religious apprehension for Coleridge initiates the process of self-projection onto and subsequent separation from the mother by which the child’s identity is shaped. The mother ‘contains his whole self, necessarily subsumed in ‘the whole problem of existence as a whole’ (no redundancy here), whose solution is ‘the word God’. Coleridge’s need to invert the natural process (for the child in reality does name its mother before any deity, surely’) may sound pathological to the psychoanalyst. Or else one could say that his theology is so warmly and maternally embodied because for Coleridge the comfort and psychological consolidation thus attained is for him indistinguishable from the originary love he (as a Christian) attributes to supernatural provision. The mother’s love repeats the Creation in the only sense meaningful to human beings. According to Coleridge, the atheist, pantheist or religious malingerer generally must be deficient in or must deny themself full consciousness of their own individuality. They must remain incomplete, not fully created. Our privileged inwardness with our own processes of formation might have been thought to aid a further understanding of God. But, no, Coleridge argues the other way round: belief in God sets the standard for personal awareness. It is with reference to God that we understand the full import of the creative ministrations of the mother to her child.
Setting up God as the benchmark of identity is continued in the Opus Maximum when Coleridge desynonymizes ‘personeity’ and ‘personality’. He writes that
We have proved that the perfection of person is in God, and that personeity, differing from personality only as rejecting all commixture of imperfection associated with the latter, is an essential constituent in the Idea of God ( OM, 177).
Certainly one’s first instinct is to read this as hortatory or edifying in its import. The homiletic drive is to get us to emulate the divine perfection, and lying behind this confident advice is a trust in the Incarnation and related Christian beliefs. If one shares the faith, these dogmas make the divine example a credible historical fact. But the linguistic production of the distinction of and continuity between divine and human identity also locates Coleridge’s explanation within a process of articulation, desynonymy, as the inspirer of further discriminations of what self-consciousness is. To get from God to us is to understand better what personality might amount to. And to get from us to God is to grasp him as inseparable from, or primarily manifest in, the project of a coherent individualism.
We can begin to illuminate what is at stake here by again considering Coleridge’s dislike of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’. His criticisms of its pantheism, as discussed elsewhere, are mostly political. The philosophical disagreement, though, is in connection here. For it might seem that Wordsworth, in his ode, is proceeding by ways of thinking analogous to those of Coleridge just analysed. Wordsworth’s child, ‘best Philosopher’, still bearing prenatal theological (or at least Paradisial) certainties, is best equipped to appreciate what he is and what his world is. In a doubling typical of the poem, though, it is ‘years that bring the philosophic mind’ mature enough to reconstruct this forgotten authority which itself had reconstituted divine authority. It is this break in the continuity between divine and human Coleridge so values that necessitates the doubled simulation or self-conscious fiction in which poetry is so expert and which here makes it the organ of philosophy. However, instead of being part of the philosophical poem Coleridge famously wanted Wordsworth to write, this move lets Wordsworth’s poetry, symbolized by the ‘child’, tum Coleridge’s philosophy into its pale imitation.
Wordsworth’s poem presents human development – ‘The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star’ – as a narrative of imitation and compensation. The child performs his identity-conferring roles to create a second nature of holiday, festival, jubilee, and, in concert with this, nature itself impresses its splendour upon him as a foster-mother endeavouring to make him forget a primal divine parentage.6 Her fostering, though, becomes the vicarious expression of that original. In mature life, therefore, our deepest instinct is to undo the world we have built up. Wordsworth does not sing the forward-looking ‘simple creed of childhood’ but
... those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts, before which our mortal Nature
Didst tremble like a guilty Thing surprized ...
He does not, like Hegel, describe the ‘vanishings’ of various stages of what will become our integration with Spirit, the fullest realization of our nature. Hegel writes of such a stage, scepticism (which I sought above to map on to Coleridge’s mystery poems), that it ‘pronounces an absolute vanishing, but the pronouncement is, and this consciousness is the vanishing that is pronounced’.7 Wordsworth comparably pronounces an ‘absolute vanishing’, but does not see that his poem manufactures its own absolute: he doesn’t accept the fact that his sense of our absolute origins is compromised by the fact that they have to be manufactured poetically. Hegel would situate his vision within an ongoing process. Schelling, closer to Coleridge here, would see this unrealizing of our given dispensation as misguided, even evil.
Wordsworth uses the ‘Platonic fiction’ of anamnesis to go back to some unrealized state to which he claims we most essentially belong, and for which the poetic effort of the poem discloses through a rhetoric of capitulation and de-materialization.8 Our ‘mortal Nature’ is to be rendered ghostly as Hamlet’s murdered father (‘like a guilty thing surprised’), leaving us, presumably, in a reality usually thought of as artificial (the play of Hamlet). In fact, though, the poem has made illusory the boundaries we normally accept as realistic (mortality). According to such higher realism, the artificial is rehabilitated as the mode in which we can appreciate the compensatory motive hidden in natural beauty. Our amnesia of this is doubled by accepting nature’s provision for us as ‘ordinary’ rather than vicarious. The symbolic resonance redeeming nature’s insincerity restores a ‘primal sympathy’ with the origins of our identity, with our divine ‘home’. But Wordsworth’s successful poetic anamnesis must have seemed to Coleridge to make unnecessary the continuing affirmation in consciousness of the infinite ‘I AM’, along with its repetitions in the idealizations of the secondary imagination. Wordsworth’s philosophical uncovering of nature’s artifice reconstructs a poetry which has already accomplished philosophy’s task.
Nevertheless, faced with such an array of dazzling paradoxes and inversions, the Schellingian Coleridge might have felt philosophically trumped. Wordsworth perhaps shows a greater adeptness in the logic of repetition by which an inchoate origin of absolute authenticity is echoed in nature’s simulation of its nurturing. Nature is most alive to us when, paradoxically, we see it as incorporating us in a festival of remembrance for defining affinities surpassing natural expression – “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ But Wordsworth’s insight is a ‘timely utterance’, its historicism matching that of the ‘higher critics’ we saw the different historicism of Coleridge’s and Schelling’s use of tautegory try to outmanoeuvre. The ode brings a particular ‘relief’, a catharsis or therapy that makes the poet ‘strong’ at a specific juncture. We encounter an occasional poem, not a perennial philosophy. Understandably, then, Wordsworth’s argument is poetically self-serving when it cancels the artifice of the child’s life as an actor, only to recuperate it at a higher level of awareness. And Wordsworth’s poetry, of course, is the discourse qualified to engage its readers on exactly that superior plane of understanding. Coleridge, I’m suggesting, has a more tautegorical view of repetition. That is to say, he is concerned not so much to validate the particular poetic strategy as to see in mothering God’s continuing articulation of the child’s existence – its actual repetition. He does not, therefore, need to privilege poetry for expressing a simulation necessary for the recovery of our authentic origins. For Coleridge, those are accessed continuously in a repeated process of normal self-construction out of an unconscious background. We don’t, so to speak, return to the ground of things and watch (‘the children sport upon the shore’); we conjure up the ground through our repeated resolution of its indeterminacies in our philosophical take on reality. And the expression of this philosophical orientation is often appropriately delegated to aesthetic, affective and other apparently non-philosophical discourses.9 Maybe this is the deeper significance anyway of Wordsworth’s repeated doubling in the ‘Immortality Ode’? But then Wordsworth’s child philosopher loses his privileged position.
In the passage from the Opus Maximum heading this chapter, Coleridge’s model for understanding this repetition is not a particular, poetic use of language but the functioning of language in general. Startlingly, he has the child spell the mother. The child, that is, comes to construe the articulated quality of his mother as the type of articulation itself. Limbs and features become the instruments of relationship through their inherence in an original unity just in the way that letters are discursively animated through their belonging to word and sentence. The absolute grounding supplied by the God-term is repeated in the relationship with the mother; and both are explained on analogy with, or even as instances of, what Coleridge calls ‘spelling’, the process by which A B becomes the Latin preposition ab or W H O the English interrogative or relative pronoun. Evidently, to spell, Coleridge is suggesting, assumes knowledge of grammar, or how the word we spell fits into a language and contributes to its workings. Coleridge defies charges of being ‘ludicrous’ or ‘trifling’ when he consequently asserts that ‘our modern philosophy is spelling throughout’ in this sense. In fact, though, he subsequently appears more worried that the success of the linguistic understanding of philosophical grounding, to which late twentieth-century readers are highly attuned by a number of dominant intellectual traditions, might render its connections with theology redundant
Coleridge is fascinated by the spectacle of a series of marks changing into the significant parts of discourse. (Paul de Man, by way of illustrative contrast, became fascinated by exactly the opposite: how a series of signs, drained of significance, could revert to brute materiality. )10 And he continually plays on the range of explanatory uses to which this transformation can be put Spelling in the exalted interpretation just examined recurs whenever Coleridge considers ‘the absolute Will’. This Schellingian ground of everything is
its own evidence. While this evidence is not present to the mind, the position is not indeed an idea at all but a notion, or like the letters expressing unknown quantities in algebra, a something conceded in expectation of a distinct significance which is to be hereafter procured. (OM, 19-20)
Elsewhere, to reverse this process, to lose the significant dimension that transforms material into word or a group of marks in the matter of discourse, is to corroborate the first passage we looked at: losing a word, for Coleridge, is like a child losing its mother; and with the mother, the ‘witness of its own being’, goes the child’s sense of identity.
Even as we sometimes dwell on a word that we had just written till we doubt, first, whether we had spelt it right, and at length it seems to us as if no such word could exist; and, in a kind of momentary trance, strive to make out its meaning out of the component letters, or of the lines of which they are composed, and nothing results! In such a state of mind has many a parent heard the three-years child that has awoke during the dark night in the little crib by the mother’s bed entreat in piteous tones, ‘Touch me, only touch me with your finger.’ A child of that age, under the same circumstances, I myself heard using these very words in answer to the mother’s enquiries, half hushing and half chiding, ‘I am not here, touch me, Mother, that I may be here!’ The witness of its own being had been suspended in the loss of mother’s presence by sight sound or feeling. (OM, 132)
Identity, the mother and form – where form means the significant inherence of part in whole typified by language – go together in Coleridge’s ontology. The concept of ‘personeity’ focuses these different forces and shows their constructive collaboration.
With the awakening of self-consciousness, the first sign or representative of which is not its own bodily shape but the gradually dawning presence of the mother’s, the conception of life is elevated into that of personeity. And as particular shape is beheld only in the higher and freer conception of form, so again this form itself, this <antecedent> whole, constitutent of its parts, is taken up into and becomes one with the yet higher, or rather deeper and more inward, principle of person. (OM, 134)
And, as said, out of this collaboration come the mutually illustrative versions of individualism making sense of human self-consciousness and of our sense of the production of the world we are necessarily obliged to read from the inside.
Finally, one can also say that perhaps the aspiration of the personal to its ideal personeity could have helped Coleridge excuse to himself the exigencies to which he seemed driven in his own literary biography. “The will’, after all, ‘cannot be an object of conception’ (OM, 18). Elsewhere he remarks, with a seemingly contradictory desire for a will to be conceptualized, that ‘a will not personal is no idea at all but an impossible conception’ (OM, 165). The point, though, is that where there is evidence of will, however random or disparate, as in the intentions accounting for the miscellany of Biographia Literaria, then, provided it is genuine evidence of will, the image of a personality undeniably is there to be found. Given the transition possible from personality to personeity, the Absolute will or personeity’s lack of differentiation can maybe underwrite the appearances of autobiographical incoherence, not by presuming, à la Wordsworth, that we can poetically coincide with our native self but to evince its unrealizability.
To return to Coleridge’s working model in the Opus Maximum, a problem remains with its linguistic extension into ideas of articulation. This difficulty inserts Coleridge’s speculation into major philosophical controversy of his own day. It is a Hegelian rather than a Schellingian position to take up when we say something like the following. The gesture towards some ultimate grounding is superfluous if it is in any case already modelled by the process of articulation required to describe it. That requirement surely replaces the original legitimation. The supposedly second-order explanation assumes priority if it is a condition for any explanation at all to be possible. Such language displaces the claims of anything to ground it, and the construction of any such pretender to anteriority must be a retrospective act, and our experience of its priority a fiction. I have consistently argued Coleridge’s philosophical sympathies to have been, in this regard, more with Schelling than with Hegel. Consistently, therefore, we must remember Coleridge’s persistent attempts to formulate a symbolic or tautegorical use of language capable of being a potency of individuation: individuation calculated to a linguistic rather than to a mathematical or any other power. Again we encounter Coleridge’s presentation of the recurrence of the same in different historical form. The linguistic pattern repeats the absolute basis of knowledge just as the maternal experience is rehearsed in all our future developments. The reproduction of mothering in personal growth and the repetition of the eternal I am in linguistic competence are different historicizations of the same thing.
Coleridge’s personalizing of the epistemological relationship needs to establish itself in contradistinction from Pantheism. This Pantheismusstreit is rather different from the famous one started by Jacobi’s remarks about Lessing, and targeting Mendelssohn and then, later, Schelling. Coleridge fends off Pantheism by asserting the priority of conscience over consciousness. The world’s reflection back to us of an identity on which we can build comes with obligations attached. Here, the model of the child responding to its mother unpacks a system of kinship, with all the accompanying duties one might expect to be entailed, that frames our growing sense of self. We achieve self-consciousness through relationship with another; and if the world is in this case our ‘companionable form’, to know the world means to be obliged to act towards it in an ethical fashion.
The conscience, I say, is not a mere mode of our consciousness, but presupposed therein. Brutes may be and are scious, but not conscious. Here, however, our present language fails in affording a term sufficiently discriminative ... (OM, 72-3)
And it is this kind of lack of discrimination that Coleridge objects to in Pantheism. The moral charge implicit in the identification with an Absolute Will through epistemology, the moral activity of relationship, is dissipated in Pantheism. Pantheism, certainly, attributes a divine presence to objects. If, therefore, we apprehend God in all things, Coleridge seems to think, we again approach the ultimate in lack of philosophical discrimination: that intellectual and moral generosity Coleridge eventually condemns as Stoicism. In another Opus Maximum passage full of spectacular modulations, Coleridge transposes from a critique of polytheism, through one of Stoicism, to a final target that looks Hegelian. Pantheism involves God in a series of impersonations whose attractive poetic play of Naiads, Hamadryads, Dryads, Zephyrs and so on soon collapses into the impersonality to which Coleridge cannot relate.
But this [Naiads and so on] and Polytheism in general are in effect the popular side of Pantheism. The unity <which reason dictates, and which is> indispensable to impersonation, is carried no further than consists with that plurality which the senses and imagination on their part require. As soon as this plurality is rejected, and the reason precipitates or deposits the heterogeneous ingredients supplied by the fancy and the passions, we have, then, in the first, and more timid stage, the Anima Mundi of the Stoics, and afterwards, when this too has been ... dismissed as a crude ... Anthropomorphism, ... a metaphor, the original of which is itself but a figment of the fancy invented from the same imbecility, and for the same purpose, namely the giving <a> separate subsistence to a unity abstracted from a multitude of effects and then idolized into the cause of the very thing of which it was but the generalization and, as it were, the abbreviature ... We have the unica substantia of Spinoza, that mysterious nothing which alone is ... (OM, 111-12)
Although Spinoza is the final philosopher attacked, the conflation of everything and nothing Coleridge attributes to his ‘substance’ or ‘God’ sounds like the first stage of knowledge to be surpassed in Hegelian phenomenology. Hegel attacks the sufficiency of immediate sense experience because it means both everything and nothing. Coleridge here argues that Spinoza’s God is a retrospective generalization or abstraction, knowledge of which pretends to the kind of undifferentiated certainty which Hegel discredits. The ‘this’ by which I denote an unarguable certainty, asserts Hegel, is applicable to anything: ‘the universal is the true content of sense-certainty ... Pure being remains, therefore, as the essence of this sense-certainty.’ Comparably, the ‘I’ enjoying sense-certainty becomes a subject-position open to all and specific to no one (‘Ich, als Allgemeines’). This is Kant’s ‘stoic principle’ carried to extremes.11 The Stoic indifference Coleridge found unpalatable in Kantian ethics here extends to epistemology. Hegel wanted mainly to convince us that all knowledge was mediated, and that these mediations could be historicized. Coleridge, like Schelling, wants to see the known world as the repetition of an original contraction from untold possibilities, or, as I think is meant by the way he puts it theologically, ‘the presence ... of all things to God’ (OM, 113). Indifference can only belong to the Absolute, and the Absolute can only be grasped as the differentiated world for which it has opted and which, consequently, is its repetition. “The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical’, writes Wittgenstein in connection. The Absolute underwriting of knowledge inspires all our responsive vocabularies of election, choice, freedom to have been different and so on, which Coleridge inveterately makes religiose. But Coleridge shares Wittgenstein’s philosophical position that regards the solution to ontological problems, the problem of the world, as something not belonging to it. The solution is then the problem’s disappearance through a justly affective response to what is in the world, to use Wittgensteinian parlance again, and is neither Hegelian nor necessarily religiose.12
Like Schelling, Coleridge thinks Pantheism or the Stoic side-stepping of the mundane lays claim to an impossibly undifferentiated apprehension of a differentiated world. In so doing, it fails to meet the standards of Schelling and Wittgenstein’s kind of philosophical rigour. Coleridge’s doctrinal Christianity may help him towards this severity, but has no technical part to play in its insight. Coleridge feels threatened by a sloppy aesthetic excitement that remains unspecific and is never integrated in a recognizable, mature moral exchange. This, at any rate, is Coleridge’s polemical view of the climactic lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘a sense sublime ... rolls through all things.’ He writes that
many a Man (I speak not without knowledge) who, lulled with these dreams and accustomed to interpret the Divine omnipresence in any sense rather than <the> alone ... safe and legitimate one – the presence ... namely, of all things to God – has thought himself abundantly religious, yea! hallowing his Sabbath with the loftiest sort of devotion ... ( OM, 113)
Such delusions, thinks Coleridge, such false sabbaths, are characteristic of ‘a transitional period in the process of intellectual growth’. But the making of this callow excitement into a lasting condition is an activity typical of ‘a number great and daily increasing [in whom] there may be observed an almost entire withdrawing from the life and personal Being of God ... not a moral Creator and Governor’ (OM, 114). Coleridge’s option for the Governor metaphor strongly marks his distrust in the use of language to animate a version of the world which remains non-relational, unspecifically electrified by a formless numinous charge. He has just levelled this accusation against the Stoics, but its ramifications apply quite sharply to the philosophical context of his own time. However unfair this is to Wordsworth, it does once more follow the logic of tautegory central to Coleridge’s thinking.
Again like Schelling, Coleridge believes that although we only grasp it in contracted, differentiated form, the Absolute is much more than this process through which it becomes identified for us. For Coleridge, this conviction is primarily religious in its implications. It fires his famous distinction between Pantheism, which he understands as the exhaustion of the concept of God in his processual immanence, and Panentheism, in which God’s natural immanence is surrounded by his other possibilities. Nature is something God can appear as, but clearly other divine aliases are possible. Schelling himself draws out the meaning of this difference in terms of his own dispute with Hegel. In his lectures ‘On the History of Modern Philosophy’ (Zur Geschichte der neuern Philosophie), probably written in the early 1830s, we again encounter a false Sabbath: Hegel’s immanent Absolute, identified with the adequation through rational process of the evolving world with our idea of it, puts God ‘in the process ... He is rather the God of eternal, perpetual doing, of incessant agitation, who never finds the Sabbath (die nie Sabbath findet). He is the God who only ever does what he has always done, and who therefore cannot create anything new’.13 Translated into ‘God’, Hegel’s Absolute is everything and nothing. How can one conjure an affective response to so indifferent a Being? How different from spelling the world in analogy with responding to an articulating, formative love? Each different stage of the Phenomenology equally represents Hegel’s Absolute, and the whole is indifferently dependent on each stage for its completion. It is, thinks Schelling, a ‘Pantheism ... in which divine freedom is all the more ignominiously lost because the impression was given of wanting to save it and sustain it’.14 All are equally essential, which is to say that none is essential. Only the whole matters, indifferent to the claims to priority of any part. But the whole is only got at, not through allowing for the possibility of an original departure, construable as a personal interest, but through the recapitulation of its already existing stages whose ‘true content’ (das Wahre), Schelling is effectively saying, is ‘the universal’ grasped by a ‘merely universal’ (nur allgemeines) subject.15 In a piece of philosophical effrontery, Schelling effectively locates Hegel’s entire philosophy in the structural dilemmas of sense-certainty that it supposedly begins its long, long progress by claiming to surpass.
Let’s try to expound a poetic example of the philosophical moment at issue here. Again, Wordsworth offers a suggestive, near contemporary comparison. In the two-part Prelude, still awaiting its ‘glad preamble’, Wordsworth’s opening presents most directly the question that sustains his poem about the growth of a poet’s mind – ‘Was it for this?’ His ‘this’ possesses both an immediate haecitas and a universal emptiness. The word is self-reflexive, as the poet asks for justification of the very word he writes now. The reference therefore appears immediate, with nothing interfering, nothing coming between poetic form and content. Equally, though, the consummating ‘this’ is to be understood as resuming and justifying everything that has happened to the poet up to this point.
Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all Rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song ... ...
For this, didst thou,
O Derwent.. .16
And so on into the first ‘spots of time’ whose restorative power is cast as the lyrical scaffolding of the rest of the poem. We only understand everything else in this poetic constitution, the implication is, through this specific moment of empowerment. Yet this spot of time’s specific significance dissolves in everything else it evokes – has existence only in its evocation of everything else. The ‘this’ isn’t this at all; or, its pretence to immediacy turns out to be universally mediated, the stuff of mediation itself, distilled eternally and ubiquitously out of the very possibility of a life’s innumerable events having some sort of coherence and direction, moving ‘in one society’.
There are poetic advantages for Wordsworth to reap from this philosophical contradiction. But the successes remain poetical at the expense of their philosophical coherence, a good thing viewed from an Arnoldian perspective, a bad thing viewed from the Hegelian perspective under consideration here. So much the worse for philosophy, we might say. Perhaps – but the poem, after all, has philosophical ambitions, and a poem whose probability arrests its own philosophical development surely weakens its own authority? Reflexivity can appear to reinforce poetic self-sufficiency; for Hegel, in his aesthetics, this absorption of the outward by an aggrandizing inwardness is just what’s wrong with Romanticism.
In poetically questioning his own poetic authority, Wordsworth appears to trivialize his own question. His asking either renders the question redundant, or else it discredits itself. If the answer to the question is not “Yes, it was for this: your language now indeed justifies nature’s nurture of you as a poet’, then why should we trust the poetic language in which the question is put? The poem’s project of creating a reliable narrator expands into thirteen books under the pressure of these anxieties. But this development only compounds the problem. For, in adducing his entire past, his total natural life, in calling to the bar everything he can as witness to the judgement he desires, he makes the sense-certainty of his demonstrative – ‘this’ – take on an unmanageable range of reference. It becomes a universal quantifier capable of infinite satisfaction, and so never satisfied in any particular case. This, Hegel suggests, is the fate of immediacy. (I almost wrote ‘all immediacy’, a contradiction which makes his point even more concisely.)
Again, arguably, this is part of the plot of Wordsworth’s poem. We would hardly want to say that it is disqualified from the start by Hegel’s philosophical objections to the idea of immediacy. The Prelude’s rendering of ‘Effort and expectation and desire, / And something ever more about to be’17 remains an unforgettable expression of our (perhaps philosophically misguided) need for immediacy in our lives. But then any poetic economy in which this characteristically human experience is to be rendered as such is bound to look inauthentic. And who can deny that the typical human project is precisely, in this sense, inauthentic: the project of closing immediately on a satisfaction and fulfilment that would extinguish the characteristic search for its mediated versions and substitutes that makes up the process, texture and experience of our lives? If we can still distinguish between poetry and philosophy, while conceding Friedrich Schlegel’s contemporary point that they have been kept separate long enough, at least for mutually explanatory purposes, we might say that philosophy has an unavoidable investment in the authentic in a way that poetry has not. Their projects here do remain separate: poetry unembarrassed and enhanced by a generosity that includes inauthenticity in its agendas and economies, philosophy troubled and diagnostic and so more attenuated than poetry because of its obligatory critique of our failure to meet authentic standards.
We might now say (with more explanatory force, I hope) that Schelling’s critique of Hegel is like my thought experiment here – a Hegelian critique of Wordsworth that doesn’t allow him to progress beyond his poem’s opening and so ignores everything else he wrote on a priori grounds. The difference, though, is that Wordsworth could rightly point to a discursive difference that makes the philosophical critique of his poetry look foreshortened and narrow-minded. It’s not so clear that such a defence is open to Hegel. Hegel’s escape Mes in the ‘speculative’ character of his propositions, and in his sanctioning of their ‘linguistic anomalies’ through which we have seen modern sympathizers have understood him to try to forge a comparable flexibility.
Now the reflexivity reinforcing poetic self-sufficiency would figure for Coleridge the dangers of Pantheism. In Biographia Literaria he does not write about The Prelude, but he does worry in his criticism of the ‘Immortality Ode’, I have argued, about the indifference of symbolism resulting from an entirely democratic notion of suitable representatives of ‘spirit’. At the conclusion of his audition of Wordsworth’s Prelude over a number of evenings on his return from Malta and Italy in January 1807, he finds himself in prayer. Such a gesture of reverence may have come back to haunt him. Here I wish to concentrate not on the political dimension of Coleridge’s anxieties, but on this symmetry between poetic self-servingness, of the kind I think Coleridge saw in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ and elsewhere, and the idea of a world so replete with divine significance that it had no need of otherworldly support – the idea of Pantheism.
In a telling moment in the poem Coleridge wrote about the experience of hearing Wordsworth recite The Prelude (in the 1805 version), he describes Wordsworth’s treatment of his own early enthusiasm for the French Revolution, confirmed by his travels in France with Robert Jones in 1790. The Revolution appears as a divine birth through the poem’s classical allusion to the nativity of a fully-formed Minerva, the goddess of reason and wisdom, plausibly invoking the Enlightenment In Wordsworth’s transposition, the deity is explosively born to a Rousseauistic humanism succeeding her original father, thunder-dealing Jupiter, submission to whose authority is ‘immediate’ and therefore unconsidered, the proper target of Hegelian suspicion and not a benign presence teaching us to spell the world aright Then, in a progress through poetic and religious hierarchies explicitly recalling that of Lycidas, the deity is sympathetically recalled to a truer, perhaps post-Enlightenment source. The ‘watchtower’ and its Miltonic authority is then in its turn overlaid by the contemporary paradigm of philosophical groundedness, the ‘absolute self:
Where France in all her Towns lay vibrating
Like some becalmed Bark beneath the burst
Of Heaven’s immediate Thunder, when no cloud
Is visible, or shadow on the Main.
For thou wert there, thine own brows garlanded,
Amid the tremor of a realm aglow,
Amid a mighty nation jubilant,
When from the general Heart of Human kind
Hope sprang forth like a full-born Deity!
Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down,
So summoned homeward, thenceforth calm and sure
From the dread Watch-Tower of man’s absolute Self.
With light unwaning on her eyes, to look
Far on – herself a glory to behold,
The Angel of the vision! Then (last strain)
Of Duty, chosen Laws controlling choice,
Action and Joy! – An orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts
To their own Music chaunted!18
The classical goddess born of political excitement is quickly put in her cultural place by the context of polytheism in which she appears. She is ‘[the goddess] Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down’. To make sense of the syntax of Coleridge’s line, we have to understand her as one goddess among many. She belongs to a culture alien to Christian monotheistic certainty, perhaps that polytheism we saw Coleridge refer to in his Opus Maximum as ‘the popular side of Pantheism’. Then, recalling the returning movement of the angel in Lycidas – ‘Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth’ – as the poem targets its final Christian destination, the goddess of hope, the ‘Angel’ of this vision, is ‘summoned homeward’. But here the decisive orientation is provided ‘from the dread watchtower of man’s absolute self. Coleridge is suggesting that the self-reflexivity of Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem takes up the role of figuring that religious authority. Wordsworth’s ‘high and passionate thoughts / To their own music chaunted’ are part of an ‘Orphic song’, recalling Greek mysteries whose religious initiates eventually provided a political classification so important for the late Coleridge’s theorizing of the Clerisy.
Of course it is ostensibly a poem about Wordsworth’s initiation, as his friend saw it, into poetic greatness. It is entirely appropriate that the poem is so elegantly plumped with allusions effectively digested by its own poetic texture. Historicism rather than chronology reinforces Wordsworth’s membership of “The truly great’, for ‘Time is not with them, / Save as it worketh for them, they in it’. The tautegory is kept intact, ‘a linked lay of Truth’, a simultaneity guaranteeing the presence of the past in the present. But the tautegory also does something else in this case, something less desirable from the point of view of Coleridge’s theology: it again emphasizes the poetic monopoly over truth here, which the intertextuality of Coleridge’s delivery has been enacting: ‘Of Truth profound a sweet continuous lay, / Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!’ Shakespeare, ‘warbling his native woodnotes wild’, is surely behind the unchallengable adequacy attributed to poetic naturalization here?
Then, personally, it is as though the poem is an elegy on Coleridge; or, in terms of the presence of Lycidas, Coleridge is Edward King, a friend (so closer than King was to Milton) ensured immortality by being the poem’s addressee. The poem then takes in as well the image of inauthenticity, which Coleridge sees himself as wearing in contrast to Wordsworth. And Coleridge’s reading of Wordsworth’s poem, the implication is, emerges enriched, not deflected in its authority, by this honest registering of the baffled human character on whose philosophical corpse, as it were, the poem can strew its elegiac flowers. But to acknowledge poetry’s encompassing both of a philosophical project and its expressive or symptomatic failure – ‘Genius given and Knowledge won in vain’ – seems again to invoke for poetry the self-sufficiency of a religious discourse. Its reader becomes a ‘devout child’, spoken to by the ‘comforter and guide’. Again the all-encompassing experience of Wordsworth’s poem’s ministration is emphasized by the peculiarly indeterminate idea of ‘my being blended in one thought / (Thought was it? Or aspiration? Or resolve?)’. The poem’s ontological adequacy then triggers the concluding prayerful response.
Pantheism, then, is a theology whose god is entirely indwelling. No otherworldly personage, scenario or vague dimension needs to be postulated as a guarantee for our sense of the numinous. In Keats’s down-to-earth expression, heaven is ‘a repetition’ of the here and now, ‘but repeated in a finer tone’.19 For Wordsworth writing the Prospectus to The Excursion, originally appended to the earlier ‘Home at Grasmere’ in 1800, paradise is arguably ‘the growth of common day’. Keats more obviously aestheticizes religion, but Wordsworth’s view is comparably supported by trust in a poetic generosity of apprehension. His intention seems to be to save religious notions from relegation to outmoded history or a dream and make them an ineliminable part of the process of perception. But this success, of course, could have the opposite effect of undermining religion by dissolving it into that intensity of experience to whose expression poetry is peculiarly suited. A poetic discourse so complete need never advance beyond referring to itself. Its reflexivity, its ‘this’, again poses as an immediate grasp of the universal. As its tide suggests, ‘Home at Grasmere’ moots a polemical ‘at-homeness’ not in need of further supplementation. For Hegel, summarising in his Preface to the Phenomenology, to be ‘at home’ (worin es sich bei sich selbst weiss) in an experience in such a way, goes against the naturally progressive effort of ‘Spirit’ or Geist20 Achieved immediacy or fulfilment of this kind precludes any scientific future. Or, in Freudian terms, it is as if we remain trapped within a primary narcissism in which the ego cannot accept the existence of any boundary between itself and the world.21 Arguably the conclusion of Hegel’s Phenomenology will be arrived at precisely when such transparency can be acknowledged; that knowledge, however, can never be gained immediately but only through the process of mediations recorded by Hegel’s entire phenomenology. These stages eventually culminate in an acceptance that the individual is designed by ‘Spirit’, properly identified by that ultimate communal form in which it can exhaust all its possibilities.
From that conclusion, Schelling argues, Hegel illicitly believes he has produced a logic of the real. In fact, though, the notion of causality that drives his logic and phenomenology is ‘final’: ‘a cause only to the extent that everything strives towards it.’ Clearly Coleridge might be in sympathy with this insofar as he thought that the personality we learnt from the linguistic fostering of our mother language, standing in for God, strove towards ‘personeity’ or the perfection of personality. We were nurtured in this direction, but never completed, by the mothering language. By the same token, though, he would have found Hegel’s account deficient in its inability to acknowledge that we are positively pushed in this direction by affective responses to the sense that the world is limited. We have, as Wittgenstein stressed, nothing further to say than is mundanely delivered us, but the positive quality of the world, ‘that’ it is, requires articulation over and above ‘how’ the world is – the world considered from the point of view of understanding and its logic. Coleridge’s own Logic or ‘Elements of Discourse’ caters for the dimension of understanding. But it requires another kind of linguistic ingenuity to express the Schellingian character of this positive philosophy. This, though, is not a licence to find the mystical anywhere: Coleridge often seems to think that Wordsworth the poet’s arrogation of philosophical authority results in this Pantheistic lack of discrimination. And if we can’t discriminate, we can’t make sense of things.
And the difficulties Coleridge has with Wordsworth’s ‘philosophical’ poetry suggest that he worries that to collapse positive philosophy into poetry will not do. The only philosophy Wordsworth mentions in his famous explanation to Isabella Fenwick of the role of Platonic anamnesis in the ‘Immortality Ode’ is confident that fiction can surround philosophy and that it is appropriate for him ‘to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a Poet’.22 Poetic sufficiency breaks the link with theology. It attenuates the total linguistic cooperation Coleridge believed was required, imaged by the Absolute care of a mothering language. Wordsworth is fascinated by the temptation to essay a poetic intimacy with an unmediated dimension subtending the world ‘wherein we find our happiness or not at all’. His susceptibility to a kind of Hegelian critique, though, uncovers the characteristic of his poetry that troubled Coleridge: that difference between believing that ‘heaven lies about us in our infancy’ and the later reconstruction of ‘God who is our home’. Wordsworth’s poetic facility is such that he can evoke a break between the two. The philosophical distance from immediacy could have been predicted. What is unbelievably ambitious in Coleridge’s view is the independent poetic authority that can turn a child into our ‘best philosopher’. It is as if Wordsworth presents Jesus’ parable about the little children entering the kingdom of heaven as no longer parabolic. The astonishing ‘Immortality Ode’, like the ‘spots of time’ in The Prelude, can get us to read it in a way that concedes that the poem, by referring to itself, isolates an experience independent of subsequent differentiation.
So ineffable a connection could belong to anything, thinks Coleridge, and that is for him the nonsense of Pantheism. But, as we have already seen, Pantheism is a problem for Coleridge not reducible to the terms of the Pantheismusstreit. Wordsworth’s ‘splendid paradoxes’ in the ‘Immortality Ode’ and elsewhere need a religious ‘binding’ (Coleridge clung to this etymology) if they are not to fall apart as they cease to hear the repetition of Being in a language we can understand and try to speak the original. Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ proposes that dissolved in the lyrical intensity with which childhood is experienced – in that immediacy – is all we need strive for by way of grasping our Absolute grounding – ‘this’: not a type of it, not a poetically conditioned absolute, but an unarguable ‘this’. Gone is the idea that yokes the mammaloschen to an increasingly articulate philosophy that can mesh with Coleridge’s belief in a Christian redemption. Gone, too, is the effort to see the repetition of the Absolute I AM in all perception, and so to ‘spell’ the world in these terms, if authority for sensing our grounding is isolated in the inimitable paradigm – linguistically as well as temporally impossible – of the little child, the infans, ‘Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!’
Wordsworth’s poetic success is politically egalitarian, and Coleridge would have problems with that It is also theologically indifferent, and that would agonize him. But it is philosophically that he tries to refute an achievement precisely on the grounds of its poetic self-sufficiency. That unnerving adequacy, that extraordinary power to transform Romantic reflexivity into a world not realized, appears to Coleridge as threatening to undo the significant world for the rest of us. The equation of poetic with ontological difference that he detects in Wordsworth has tempted philosophers down to Heidegger, and will no doubt continue to do so. Typical, though, of the post-Kantian moment to which Coleridge belonged, was the understanding that a wider combination of discourses was required for ontological spelling than poetry. Poetry had come to represent the aesthetic for which Kant so memorably in his third Critique carved out an autonomy allowing its judgements to bridge the gap between phenomenal and noumenal reality. But post-Kantian critique of that difference, from Fichte onwards, had also questioned the exclusive role Kant apparently delegated to the aesthetic. Increasingly post-Kantian thought abandons the idea of a ‘literary Absolute’, except as it perpetually unpacks itself, progressively, into other discourses over time. The Jena idea of poetry, as Walter Benjamin famously stated, was prose, a much wider practice than any literary establishment might encompass, and something with a place for each of us. Tautegory and tautegorical thought become the historical extension in all manner of expressions and logoi of an original thought unconscious at the point of utterance – more of the same, not the same. This philosophy of revelation was Coleridge’s own formulation, which Schelling took to parallel the trajectory of his own thought after he stopped publishing in 1809. At any rate, it is in that arena of intensely argued German philosophical debate, that these issues, and perhaps that emancipation, are most visible.