THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: COLERIDGE AND POST-KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY
IN CONVERSATION WITH Henry Nelson Coleridge in 1831, Samuel Taylor Coleridge offered the following assessment of his philosophical achievements:
My
system is the only attempt that I know of ever made to reduce all knowledges
into harmony; it opposes no other system, but shows what was true in each, and
how that which was true in the particular in each of them became error because
it was only half the truth. I have
endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth and frame a perfect
mirror. (Table Talk 1: 246)
This is a revealing statement, and not the least so because of its diverging implications. The general picture-of Coleridge having harmonized all systems of knowledge in a grand synthesis by bringing out what was ""half" true in each-is strikingly Hegelian in appearance. This is offset, however, by the image of the philosopher framing a "perfect mirror," suggesting an underlying notion of truth as a matter of correspondence between the mind and something other than itself, rather than the coherentist theory defended by Hegel. A similar tension is evident between Coleridge's conviction that he has succeeded in assembling a unified "system" and his awareness of the fragmentary, incomplete nature of the "knowledges" that have gone into its construction. Elsewhere, indeed, he cites the very limitations of consciousness as evidence of the constitutive role of conscience in knowledge. Without the involvement of a free act of will (or faith), the self was merely, as he noted in 1825, "a Proteus, modifiable into a thousand forms," each of which was "a representation, of a somewhat that is not myself," or a kind of endlessly deferred, "Self-conscious, self-sentient looking-glass" (Notebooks 4: note 5280).
Remarks such as these bear
witness to the delicate balance that Coleridge's later thought attempted to
maintain between two major themes in post-Kantian German philosophy: the
methodology of dialectic and the ontology of will. That an English poet of the period would undertake such an
enterprise is remarkable, and in Coleridge's case all the more so, since his
acquaintance with the philosophical figures most closely associated with these
currents-Hegel and Schopenhauer-was fleeting in the first instance, and
non-existent in the second . . . Coleridge's contact with German thought at the
end of the eighteenth century complicates matters even further, however, for he
was encouraged at first by what he read there to theorize . . . new
development[s] in English poetry along Schillerian lines. The collapse of Coleridge's attempt in Biographia Literaria (1817) to emulate Schelling's project to
reconcile notions of aesthetic freedom with the pantheistic principles of Naturphilosophie in fact marks the
beginning of his intensified interest in dialectic and will, both of which were
already present in that early work.
Increasingly convinced that
spiritual being occupied a ground inaccessible to philosophy, and turning from
art to religion as the expression of this, Coleridge set out on what became the
central endeavor of his later work: to
establish a new doctrine of theosophy by habituating philosophy to religion,
and making religion amenable to philosophy . . . Any general reevaluation of
Coleridge's later work, then, must address the central problem of how his
theosophy adjudicated the relationship between philosophy and religion, a
relationship that became particularly uncomfortable because by "philosophy"
Coleridge already meant something universal and certainly apodeictic, a total
and undivided "philosophy" combining diversity in unity (Biographia 2: 282). This
question leads immediately to Coleridge's attempt to reconcile a dialectical
methodology with an ontology of absolute will, to harmonize the "concrete
universal" with the "faith of reason."
Such a reassessment of Coleridge's later work must also at some point
redress the very partial views of Coleridge that have in the past fifteen years
or so argued that his work prefigures, or is continuous with, aspects of modern
theory, such as deconstruction and the much-trumpeted "death" of
epistemology. Doing so will involve
questioning both Hegelian and indeterminist readings of Coleridge in order to
suggest that what lies behind his apparent ability to act as a "perfect mirror"
for so many of the varied and even conflicting concerns of modern theory is an
unresolved philosophical dilemma in his own work, a dilemma that, nonetheless,
marks him as occupying a unique location at a crossroads in the development of
Western philosophy after Kant.