A Modern Coleridge

Cultivation, Addiction, Habits

A. Timár

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137531469
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A Modern Coleridge shows the interrelatedness of the discourses of cultivation, addiction and habit in Coleridge's poetry and prose, and argues that these all revolve around the problematic nexus of a post-Kantian idea of free will, essential to Coleridge's eminently modern idea of the 'human'.

Part I

Cultivation

1

Cultivating Reason and the Will

In On the Constitution of the Church and State, Coleridge calls for the necessity of ‘cultivation’, a process that he defines as ‘the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity’ (Ch & St, 42). Then, supplementing the definition with specifying its aim, he adds, ‘We must be men in order to be citizens’ (Ch & St, 43, italics in the original). Raymond Williams notes that this is the first time the word ‘cultivation’ has been used to ‘denote a general condition, a “state or habit” of the mind’ (66–67). Stephen Bygrave, outlining the English etymology of ‘cultivation’, has shown that this agricultural term had been used as a metaphor for education from the mid-18th century onwards (34, 190–191nn). However, David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, as well as John Kooy, have also underlined that although the term was already embedded in the English discourses on education, it was the ‘German’ notion of culture’ (Lloyd and Thomas, 66), and, especially Friedrich Schiller’s idea of aesthetic education or Bildung (Kooy), which exerted the greatest influence on Coleridge’s notion of ‘cultivation’. Kooy places the emphasis on the liberal aspects of Schillerian Bildung, arguing that Coleridgean ‘cultivation’ shares with Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’ the ‘ambition to develop in an undetermined and unimpeded way all aspects of one’s personality’ (161, italics added); Lloyd and Thomas, however, foreground the relationship Coleridge establishes between cultivation and the state, and stress the conservative, Burkean aspects of the term: cultivation ‘develop[s] in individuals the capacity to be citizens for the state’ (67). Indeed, as has already been suggested by Williams, Coleridgean cultivation importantly anticipates Mathew Arnold’s explicitly politicised notion of ‘culture’, which already ‘suggests the idea of the State’ (Culture and Anarchy, 89)

In what follows, I shall first linger on Coleridge’s understanding of ‘humanity’, which, being the precondition of citizenship, cultivation has to develop. Doing so, I shall focus on the controversial role Coleridge attributes to free will and agency in his conception of the ‘human’. Kooy explains the potential content of ‘cultivation’ by quoting Coleridge’s ‘3 principles, by which Human Nature is distinguished from the Brute, and which therefore ought to be developed in all Men alike -- the Rational, the Moral, and the Religious principles’ (Kooy, 159). In The Friend, Coleridge differentiates between the animal and the human along similar lines by attributing active agency to the latter as opposed to the natural passivity of the former: man shares with animals the property of Sense, that is, ‘whatever is passive in our being’, the ‘sensations, and impressions’ (F II., 104), but he is distinguished from them in equally possessing active faculties: ‘the faculty of thinking and forming judgements on the notices furnished by the Sense’, as well as ‘Practical Reason, […] the power by which we become possessed of Principles (the eternal verities of Plato and Descartes) and of Ideas, (N.B. not images) as the ideas of a point, a line, a circle in Mathematics; and of Justice, Holiness, Free-Will, &c. in Morals’ (F II., 104). Coleridge’s emphasis on the faculty of judgement and, especially, ‘Practical Reason’¹ suggests that he does not define ‘humanity’ on the basis of social provenance. Instead, he establishes an opposition between ‘man’, on the one hand, and ‘the barbarian, the savage, and the animal’ on the other: by cultivation, he writes, ‘[w]e do not mean those degrees of moral and intellectual cultivation which distinguish man from man in the same civilised society, much less those that separate the Christian from the this-worldian; but those that constitute civilized man in contra-distinction from the barbarian, the savage, and the animal’ (Ch & St, 74).

Indeed, Coleridge’s ‘man’ is always civilised: he can develop his qualities and faculties, because he is part of human society. Coleridge is convinced that ‘the very constitution of our humanity […] supposes the social state’ (Ch & St, 13), and that our ‘humanity’ can only develop (i.e. cultivation can only happen) in a social context: society, he writes, is ‘the prepared ladder by which the lower nature is taken up (into), and made to partake of the higher’ (OM, 91). However, while ‘humanity’ can only develop in society, and, therefore, cultivation (the full development of the ‘human faculties’) requires the individual to be living in a social state, what cultivation allows him to do is precisely to transcend both his natural and his social determinations, and identify with what Coleridge conceives as the (almost, but not quite) ‘universally’ human (i.e. ‘the civilized man in contra-distinction from the barbarian, the savage, and the animal’, Ch & St, 74). All in all, cultivation is supposed to impart and develop those universal human qualities and faculties that are independent of the individual’s social status, but distinguish ‘man’ from ‘animal’.³

Coleridge phrases this important distinction via Kant; while animals (as well as barbarians and savages) are doomed to remain ‘slaves’, that is, only ‘means’, humans are ‘persons’, and ‘ends’ in themselves (Ch & St, 15); they ‘are responsible Agents; Persons, and not merely living Things’ (AR, 78). As was mentioned in the Introduction, the ‘rise’ from animal to human is described by Coleridge in similarly Kantian terms, as the gradual manifestation of free will: ‘in irrational Agents the Law constitutes the Will. In moral and rational agents the Will constitutes, or ought to constitute, the Law’ (AR, 300n). Differently put, whereas ‘the barbarian, the savage, and the animal’ are determined by natural laws, ‘civilised’ and ‘cultivated’ individuals are free and autonomous in the sense that they are able to determine the Law for themselves. As he further writes: ‘the Will is ultimately self-determined, or it is no longer a Will under the law of perfect Freedom, but a Nature under the mechanism of cause and effect’ (AR, 285).

It is also ‘the will’ that forms the ‘ground and condition’ of our individual ‘personality, or Moral being’ (F I., 155); according to Coleridge, ‘we become persons exclusively in consequence of the will’ (OM, 164–165). Of course, Coleridge’s ideas on religious and moral development are deeply intertwined: in his Christianised version of Kantianism (Mary Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, 84) the ultimate telos of human agency, activity, and free will is their unity with God’s (see also Vallins, 126–127). Hence, while the will that characterises humans as opposed to the ‘Brute’ is only meaningful insofar as it approximates, in order to eventually unite with, that of God,⁴ our ‘personality, or Moral being’ (F I., 155) equally strives towards the ideal of divine ‘Personëity’ (OM, 164) or ‘personeity’ (OM, 177).⁵ During the process of ‘cultivation’, therefore, the ‘will’ struggles upward to become ‘free will’, but only to become one with the ‘Will of God’, while the moral ‘person’ or ‘personality’ (latently there in each of us) struggles to approximate the idea of the Divine Personëity.

In Coleridge’s ideal State, the class endowed with the task of cultivation would be a disinterested ‘Clerisy’, the essence of which is epitomised by Coleridge’s ideal man, the Parson. This ‘persona exemparis’ (Ch & St, 53n) acts as the earthly representative of the Divine Personëity, and embodies both the Christian idea Love and the Kantian idea of Personality. At the same time, however, as the repository of the values attributed by Coleridge to the institutions of both the Church and the State, the clerisy not only act as moral and religious guide to the population, but also prepare them for responsible citizenship: they ‘diffuse through the whole community, and to every native entitled to its laws and rights, that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indispensable both for the understanding of those rights, and for the performance of the duties correspondent’ (Ch & St, 42–43). As Joshua King also explains:

the ‘most crucial responsibility of the clerisy’ would be ‘to accompany explanations’ of the ‘laws and rights’ to which British citizens are ‘entitled’ (CS [Ch & St] 44) with the awakening of what Coleridge called ‘the potential divinity in every man’ (CS [Ch & St] 52), each person’s intuitive but latent knowledge of the ‘responsible will’ and the ‘ultimate’ ethical ‘ends’ toward which it is to be directed. (27)

Indeed, Coleridge’s idea of ‘humanity’ is thoroughly politicised. And politicised not only in an ideal sense (e.g. the clerisy has to teach the rights and the duties of the citizen) but also in a very concrete one. For example, the members of the clerisy are also endowed with the task to prepare the members of the community for military service: they should ‘form and train up the people of the country to obedient, free, useful, organisable subjects, citizens, and patriots, living to the benefit of the state, and prepared to die for its defence’ (Ch & St, 54). According to this definition, in which the subject is paradoxically interpellated as both free and obedient, individual free-will harmonises with both the will of God and that of the State. As Coleridge puts it earlier in The Friend:

If therefore society is to be under a rightful constitution of government, and one that can impose on Rational beings a true and moral obligation to obey it, it must be framed on such principles that every individual follows his own Reason while he obeys the laws of the constitution, and performs the will of the state while he follows the dictates of his own reason. (F I., 192, italics in original)

Coleridge’s argument, at the same time, also exemplifies François Lyotard’s claim that post-Enlightenment narratives of legitimation are always based on a Kantian idea of freedom informed by the Rousseauvian idea of the Social Contract. According to this narrative, writes Lyotard, the laws the subject ‘makes for itself are just […] because the legislators are, constitutionally, the very citizens who are subject to the laws. As a result, the legislator’s will […] will always coincide with the will of the citizen, who desires the law and will therefore obey it’ (34). Of course, Coleridge rejects the Rousseauvian concept of the ‘general will’, which he understands as the imposition of the laws of abstract Reason on individuals:⁷

all which is said in the Contrat social of that sovereign Will, to which the right of universal Legislation appertains, applies to no one Human Being, to no Society or Assemblage of Human Beings, and least of all to the mixed Multitude that makes up the PEOPLE; but entirely and exclusively to REASON itself, which, it is true, dwells in every Man potentially, but actually and in perfect purity is found in no Man and in no Body of Men. (F II., 127–128)

Yet, Coleridge’s emphasis on the potentiality of Reason in every man indicates that he never actually opposes the Kantian-Rousseauvian idea of Reason conceived as a ‘universal’ faculty. This (relatively) enlightened Kantianism comes to the fore if we place it in the context of Edmund Burke’s conservative thought. Burke is convinced that ‘[w]e are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages’(129). Unlike Burke, Coleridge already uses ‘Reason’ in a Kantian sense, and believes that Reason is potentially, or latently, there in (almost) every man (i.e. that Reason is, potentially, universal) and that, therefore, it can and has to be developed through the process of cultivation.

However, since man has not yet emerged ‘from his self-imposed immaturity’,⁸ the State has no other option, for the moment, than to have recourse to the solution also proposed by Burke: to enforce the application of ‘traditional laws … enlightened by past experience’ – which ‘become just because they happen to be expedient’ (F I., 198–199).⁹ Coleridge’s advocacy of tradition as political expediency results from a conviction that only cultivation, the full development of those active faculties that characterise our ‘humanity’, will render people suitable for responsible citizenship. In other words, only cultivation (a process always en procès) can pave the way towards the actualisation of Reason, towards what Kant would call man’s ‘maturity’. And since Reason is not only private but also has a public role to play, cultivation equally proves to be the possibility condition of Coleridge’s idea of the constitution, which can only come into being when Reason has already been developed in each individual.

Yet, while Coleridge believes in the (quasi-)universality of Reason, he remains uncertain all through his life whether ‘every native’ should be allowed to rely on, or even to improve, his Understanding, what Burke has termed ‘his own, private stock of reason’. Differently put, Coleridge remains uncertain whether ‘universal learning’, which includes, among other things, the universal teaching of reading and writing, may not ‘become confluent with the evils, it was intended to preclude’ (LS, 42, italics added). On the one hand, at the time of composing ‘The Statesman’s Manual’ in 1816, he was convinced that ‘it is folly to think of making all […] men of systematic knowledge, [b]ut it is duty and wisdom to aim at making as many as possible soberly and steadily religious’ (LS, 69, italics added). Specifically, he believes, as will be discussed more in detail in the second part of this book, that printed words, which could be made available to all by the unprecedented spread of literacy (further enhanced by the reading and writing taught at National Schools) and by the fast diffusion of printing, can be both used and abused by readers who are, as yet, not sufficiently cultivated.¹⁰ Hence, the lower classes will have the right to ‘universal learning’, when they become sufficiently cultivated to monitor themselves.

On the other hand, however, by the time of composing the Church and State, he became aware that it was impossible to restrain the diffusion of knowledge, and that it would be ‘silly’, that is, politically dangerous not to let the people educate themselves. As he put it, ‘it was at all times wicked to wish […] and it would be now silly to attempt’ that ‘the requisite means of intellectual development and growth should be withheld from any native of the soil’ (Ch & St, 88). Further, the knowledge acquired through individual learning has to be, according to Coleridge, equally rewarded by political power: ‘the gifts of the understanding, whether the boon of genial nature, or the reward of more persistent application, should be allowed fair play in the acquiring of that proprietorship, to which a certain portion of political power belongs, as its proper function’ (Ch & St, 88). Deeming the divorce of the possession of knowledge from the possession of propriety also dangerous from a political point of view he proposes that those who succeed in acquiring knowledge should also acquire political power, which has to be bound up with the possession of property. At the same time, he remained convinced that knowledge coupled with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Cultivation
• Part II Addiction
• Part III Habits
• Conclusion: Cultivation through Love: ‘Effusion XXXV’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index