Aesthetics, Poetics and Phenomenology in Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Tom Marshall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030527303
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book re-evaluates the philosophical status of Samuel Taylor Coleridge byproviding an extended comparison between his work and the phenomenologicaltheory of Edmund Husserl. Examining Coleridge's accounts of the imagination, perception, poetic creativity and literary criticism, it draws a systematic andcoherent structure out of a range of Coleridge's philosophical writing. In addition, it also applies the principles of Coleridge's philosophy to an interpretation of hisown poetic output.

© The Author(s) 2020

T. MarshallAesthetics, Poetics and Phenomenology in Samuel Taylor Coleridgehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52730-3_3

Begin Abstract

Coleridge’s Phenomenological Engagements with Idealism

Tom Marshall¹

(1)

Brighton, UK

End Abstract

Idealism as a Philosophical Foil

In the chapters following the critique of Hartley, Coleridge continues to prepare the ground for his account of the imagination through a highly narrativised account of his own intellectual development, framing it as an exacting search for a truly systematic philosophy. Among the list of names populating this account, three in particular stand out as significant catalysts: Kant, Fichte and Schelling, the leading figures of the Critical philosophy. The biographical veracity of these chapters has been shown to be questionable at best,¹ but their philosophical function as part of Coleridge’s ongoing argument is also worth examining. Whilst the polemical quality of chapters five to seven attempts to dissuade the reader from an account of the imagination grounded in materialist empiricism , the more positive presentation of these German influences forms a rhetorical counterbalance to this, offering a precedent for the style of argument Coleridge wants to construct in its place. If Coleridge’s attack on associationism is driven by a search for ideal laws over contingent causal patterns, the various systems of Critical philosophy each go some way to addressing this problem by placing philosophy upon rigorous, systematic foundations rooted in a transcendental analysis of the mind’s activity. The overall impression one gets from Coleridge’s neat summary is that these thinkers form a more or less unbroken line of progression and development, with each offering new insights to supplement and improve upon their predecessor. What this presentation elides, however, is the complex and ambivalent relationship that Coleridge had towards all of these systems, which in turn obscures the fact that his own position develops just as much through opposition as through agreement. Unlike associationism, which he makes an overt show of setting up and knocking down, these engagements require one to look further afield than just Biographia. It is Coleridge’s marginal annotations on major systematic works, as well as remarks made in other contexts such as his letters or notebooks, that give a sense of what Coleridge focused on in his reading, as well as the questions and problems he most sought to engage with.

An important aim in this chapter will be to argue that the differences between Coleridge and his German sources are just as informative as the commonalities. As such, it will avoid the more concessionary route taken by Gian Orsini, who considers Coleridge an eloquent mediator of other thinkers’ complicated ideas .² This is largely informed by his view that ‘Coleridge is primarily a poet’,³ an assumption which implicitly relegates his philosophical interests to the level of an enthusiastic dilettantism. Appearing in 1969, Orsini’s study predates the publication of a great deal of Coleridgean material, including the collected marginalia which will be relied upon here, a fact that he openly acknowledges when he declares that his work ought to be taken ‘in the nature of an interim report’.⁴ Once these materials are taken into account, it becomes considerably more difficult to conclude that Coleridge sought merely to mediate and disseminate German ideas rather than critically engage with them on the basis of his own philosophical project. A more critical variant of Orsini’s assumptions also informs the approach taken by René Wellek, who admonishes Coleridge’s philosophy as ‘heterogenous, incoherent and even contradictory’ to the point where studying it is declared ‘ultimately …futile’.⁵ The primary limitation of Wellek’s otherwise very well-informed critique is that it assesses Coleridge’s engagement with Kant from a predominantly Kantian perspective, which leads him to interpret similarities as debts and differences as shortcomings. More specifically, Wellek seems unable to view Coleridge’s attempt to move beyond the strict limits of Kant’s epistemology as anything more than a yearning to return to pre-critical Christian metaphysics.⁶ Whilst there is undeniably some truth to this assessment as far as Coleridge’s theology goes, it ignores the fact that Coleridge evidently had other reservations about the viability of Kant’s representationalist conception of consciousness that were independent of his faith. Accordingly, this chapter will aim to demonstrate how Coleridge’s engagement illustrates a consistent phenomenological concern about formulating an adequate conception of consciousness, one which distinguishes him from his German contemporaries.

Rather than offer a comprehensive overview of Coleridge’s relation to Kant, Fichte or Schelling , the following comparisons will focus on a specific theme that is particularly salient to the development of the argument of Biographia: the accounts of the subject-object relationship. The aim will be to demonstrate Coleridge’s reservations with how all three thinkers conceptualise this relationship culminating in a position which shares a great deal with Husserl’s account of intentionality.⁷ In the case of Kant, the division of the world into phenomena and noumena obfuscates how the mind accesses the world beyond it. This does not so much solve the problem as redefine it as one of how the acts of the mind condition what is given in merely phenomenal experience. Whilst from Kant’s perspective this acts as an effective form of epistemological restraint, which ultimately justifies the mind’s application of its innate categories, for Coleridge it unacceptably alienates the subject from the world and limits any sense of justification to an internalised set of arbitrary relations. The desire to move beyond the phenomena/noumena distinction is by no means unique to Coleridge and is a defining feature of the post-Kantian systems of Fichte and Schelling . Whilst Coleridge finds common cause in these philosophers’ efforts to move beyond Kant’s strict limitations, when it comes to their respective alternatives he expresses significant reservations about both. In the case of Fichte, Coleridge is supportive of the effort to close the gap between theoretical and practical philosophy by grounding the system in an act rather than a representation. The problem comes with Fichte’s efforts to encapsulate Kant’s thing-in-itself within an absolute, all-encompassing subjectivity, which Coleridge rejects for its disconnect with experiences of limitation and transcendence. Of all the post-Kantians, Coleridge finds Schelling’s philosophy to be the most promising in terms of building on Kant, as it is premised on reintroducing a robust conception of objective nature back into the dialectic through the notion of naturphilosophie. However, whereas Fichte was guilty of overemphasising the role of the mind in the mind-world dynamic, Schelling’s system risks not differentiating strongly enough between the two in its attempts to accommodate this binary within an absolute identity. The path that Coleridge attempts to forge between these various philosophical positions is one that, like Kant, retains a robust notion of a mind-independent world; like Fichte, gives the mind an active role in engaging with the world; and, like Schelling, aims not to give undue priority to either the subject or object in accounting for this interaction.⁸

Kant

For all that his own thought sought to move beyond him, it is clear that Coleridge held Kant in a higher regard than almost any other philosopher. In a letter to J. H. Green, he declares that ‘I reverence Immanuel Kant with my whole heart and soul; and believe him to be the only philosopher, for all men who have the power of thinking’,⁹ and advised James Gooden that ‘In him [Kant] is contained all that can be learnt’.¹⁰ These praises are illustrative in the emphasis placed on Kant’s pedagogical efficacy rather than the truth of his philosophical system, which is echoed in a marginal note to K. W. F. Solgar which states that ‘Kant had <1st> to overthrow, 2nd to build a the best possible temporary shed and Tool-House, both for those ejected from the old Edifice, & for the erection of a new Edifice’.¹¹ Coleridge’s ‘Tool-House’ metaphor makes it clear that he sees Kant as providing a worthy method for philosophy, even if his version of Critical philosophy is presented as a necessary but insufficient step on the path to a complete system. Kant’s major shortcoming in Coleridge’s eyes is his strict epistemic dualism between the phenomenal world of appearances and the noumenal world of things in themselves. This much is indicated in Biographia when Coleridge notes that ‘I could never believe, it was possible for him to have meant no more by his Noumen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: The Finite Mind
• Anti-Psychologism and Ideal Laws in Biographia I
• Coleridge’s Phenomenological Engagements with Idealism
• Imagination and Intentionality
• Coleridge’s Epoché
• ‘The Acts of the Mind Itself’: Eidetic Intuition and the ‘Conversation Poems’
• Conclusion
• Back Matter