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E312: British Literature since 1760 Supplementary Thoughts on Coleridge, by Al Drake Alfred J. Drake. Office: 424 University Hall *Since I decided to discuss STC's poetry in class rather than his difficult prose, which I know from experience takes a long time to deal with adequately, here is a commentary on both the Kantian basis of English romanticism and some of the most important parts of the assigned Coleridge selections. It is rather long, so I don't offer it as required reading -- I would only suggest that you read this commentary to the extent that your time permits. In the work of S.T. Coleridge (1772-1834), the most philosophically inclined among the English Romantic poets, we can see the influence of Continental thinkers like Kant, Schelling, and Schiller. Philosophically, English Romanticism is a complex reaction both against materialist-tending aspects of British empiricism (empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge derives from experience), and most especially against French rationalism (the belief that we can derive our knowledge from reason alone, without recourse to sensory experience). Coleridge, like many of his contemporaries, opposed the mechanistic worldview of Newtonian physics and the passivity of the psychology worked out by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, according to which the mind, like a soft machine, merely acted as the receptor and combiner of sense data. For Coleridge, Imagination is something more than the faculty of combining ideas derived from sensory perception, just as memory, for William Wordsworth, is more than what Thomas Hobbes called "decaying sense." With respect to rationalism, Coleridge opposes the Cartesian dualist split between the individual subject and the world. Following Friedrich von Schelling especially, Coleridge tries to overcome the rift between mind and matter implied by the formula, "cogito, ergo sum" ("I think; therefore I am.") In defiance of supposedly atheist materialism and sterile rationalist dependence on reason and mathematical abstraction, then, Coleridge, taking his cue in part from the Germans, posits a vital and interdependent view of science, history, nature, artistic creation, and human potential. Before we move to Coleridge himself, it would be appropriate to consider the most important German philosopher whose works he had long been reading. We pave the way to Coleridge, therefore, with a brief sketch of Immanuel Kant's most important ideas. Kant (1724-1804), was born in Königsberg, Germany, in which city he remained to study mathematics, physics, and philosophy at university, and later to profess the latter subject himself. Although a quiet, untraveled man whose Enlightenment emphasis on Reason hardly qualified him as a Romantic, he nonetheless provided later thinkers with the foundation for a fully Romanticist outlook. Kant, though he wrote on a startling variety of subjects, was determined to avoid extreme tendencies in any brand of philosophy, whether that extremism amounted to radical skepticism or empiricism, absolute rationalism, or the metaphysical word-wrangling of the medieval schoolmen. In The Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), he synthesizes the empiricism and rationalism that influenced his early thinking into what he believes is a coherent epistemological system. In essence, Kant argues that humans have no direct access to the outside world. Presumably, there is a world out there, a "noumenal world," but nonetheless we have no direct knowledge of it, and no right to claim that we do. So much for the cruder type of empiricists who assume too easily that they really do have some direct link with material objects; so much, also, for those who argue that there simply is no outside world. How, then, do we perceive and know things? That question, of course, occupies the whole of the First Critique, as the above named book is often called, but let us examine a few brief paragraphs from Kant's difficult launching of his question in Book I, "Transcendental Aesthetic": In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed. But intuition takes place only in so far as the object is given to us. This again is only possible, to man at least, in so far as the mind is affected in a certain way. The capacity (receptivity) for receiving representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects, is entitled sensibility. Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts. But all thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the transcendental aesthetic we shall, therefore, first isolate sensibility, by taking away from it everything which the understanding thinks through its concepts, so that nothing may be left save empirical intuition. Secondly, we shall also separate off from it everything which belongs to sensation, so that nothing may remain save pure intuition and the mere form of appearances, which is all that sensibility can supply a priori. In the course of this investigation it will be found that there are two pure forms of sensible intuition, serving as principles of a priori knowledge, namely, space and time. Kant's terminology is difficult in any language, but the emphasis in this passage is clear-Kant says that his task as an analyst is to strip away particular, everyday mental operations in order to isolate "sensibility"-the "capacity (receptivity) for receiving representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects." Having performed that reduction, Kant believes that he can posit "pure intuition" and its "forms of sensible intuition," the categories space and time. He wants to show that these categories exist a priori (i.e., before any empirical experience) in the mind and that they necessarily structure the reception of objects. In Critical Theory Since Plato, Hazard Adams explains the matter concisely, and clarifies the Kantian transition from simple perception to higher "thinking": As Adams says, Kant proposes the existence of the "manifold of sensation," the raw data collected and organized by the mind through the creative power of the sensibility. The sensibility abstracts from the manifold, formulating the world intellectually according to space and time, the a priori forms of consciousness . . . . we cast all our perceptions into the forms of space and time, which are the spectacles we all wear but can never remove. At a higher level, further removed from direct sensation, the power of the understanding comes into play and schematizes our sensible experience according to "categories"--unity, plurality, totality, substance, causation, and so on. These categories govern our conceptual thought. Just as we cannot experience anything without putting on the spectacles of space and time, so we cannot think without casting our thoughts into the categories. (377) This cautious formulation of Kant's about perceiving and intellection, as we noted above, had profound effects on later thinkers. In a sense, Kant was the Milton of philosophy-the figure whom interested parties had to take into account when they set pen to paper concerning epistemology (the theory of knowledge). We might make the same statement about Kant's aesthetics. In essence, Kant argues that when humans make judgments about beautiful objects, they do not make them with reference to any external standard or purpose. In Kant's scheme, referring a pronouncement on art's beauty to some theory of imitation or morality will not do. Rather, a judgment that, say, a rose, a building, or a work of art is beautiful must be made with disinterested satisfaction; it must be made without reference to its concordance with some "real" object, without reference to its "usefulness" or "tendency to instill moral goodness" or "power to gratify our senses." As Kant himself argues, If anyone asks me if I find that palace beautiful which I see before me, I may answer: I do not like things of that kind which are made merely to be stared at. Or I can answer like that Iroquois sachem, who was pleased in Paris by nothing more than by the cook shops. Or again, after the manner of Rousseau, I may rebuke the vanity of the great who waste the sweat of the people on such superfluous things. In fine, I could easily convince myself that if I found myself on an uninhabited island without the hope of ever again coming among men, and could conjure up just such a splendid building by my mere wish, I should not even give myself the trouble if I had a sufficiently comfortable hut. This may all be admitted and approved, but we are not now talking of this. We wish only to know if this mere representation of the object is accompanied in me with satisfaction, however indifferent I may be as regards the existence of the object of this representation . . . . We must not be in the least prejudiced in favor of the existence of the things, but be quite indifferent in this respect, in order to play the judge in things of taste. (Critical Theory Since Plato 379-80) To say that a rose is beautiful, then, is fundamentally different from saying that it is good or sensually gratifying or useful. Obviously, such a judgment does not accord with the kind of moral condemnation of art we see in Plato, who claimed that artists, in copying mere appearances rather than external Truth, inevitably mislead the deluded spectator or listener. Neither does Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment accord well with certain moral defenses of art-the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney's, for example, which posits that the "speaking pictures" created by the artist instill in the audience the desire to behave virtuously. No, the viewer, reader, or listener must judge of the beautiful with respect only to what Adams calls "the internality of the work itself." That is, "with no exterior purpose admitted and no exterior ideal of beauty allowed, the work must generate its own standard, its own internal purpose" (377). For Kant, art and artistic experience, though subordinate to religion, together constitute an autonomous realm. Perhaps we may sum up as follows the threads in Kant's philosophy later to be exploited by the Romantics: firstly, Kantian epistemology, while making no attempt to bridge the gap between the mind, or "subject," and the world outside, or "object," nonetheless concentrates acutely on the mental constructs whereby humans perceive and know the objective world. Without sacrificing the validity of the external world, Kant focuses on the constitutive power of mental experience. In terms of aesthetics, Kant's emphasis on the special quality of judgments about the beautiful opens up for later theorists an important claim-namely, that both art and the artists who create it deserve our consideration precisely because they have and provide access to a kind of freedom, a kind of autonomy, lacking in other, more immediately practical, areas of life-politics, religion, economics, and so on. Art, wherein reigns what Kant labels "purposiveness without purpose" will soon be taken up, credibly or otherwise, as a means whereby rifts in the human self and in human societies may be made whole. Imagination, for Kant, may be straightforwardly "an active power or ability to structure the particular features of . . . [an] intuition in accordance with the structure of the concept [that it matches]," but men like Friedrich von Schelling, Coleridge, and others will quickly make of it a truly creative, dynamic power which does not merely structure reality for the perceiving subject but which, to some extent, makes it, or at least participates in its making. Coleridge on Primary and Secondary Imagination (Statesman's Manual); Genius and Organic / Mechanic Form (Lectures on Shakespeare) With that comment, we may turn to Coleridge's own speculations, most specifically to his ideas about imagination in Biographia Literaria, Chapters 13-14. The book as a whole is a sprawling masterpiece of the sort that only Coleridge could have produced. It contains material assimilated from several Romantic authors-Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schiller, and others. Most instructive for us, however, is the following passage, in which Coleridge goes far beyond Kant's modest claims about the creative powers of the mind: The imagination then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. (Norton 7th Ed., 477) In the passage above, Coleridge appears to be identifying as the "primary imagination" the basic capacity of the mind to participate in the creation of the world around it. In order to see how Coleridge has expanded upon Kant's term "imagination," we must examine that term in a little more detail than we have yet done. In his Introduction to The Critique of Judgment, Werner Pluhar explains the Kantian imagination's function: If an empirical judgment consists in the awareness that an empirical intuition matches some concept, how did that match come about? The data we receive passively through sensation are structured in terms of space and time and thus become an empirical intuition. If this intuition is to match a concept, we must have an active power or ability to structure the particular features of that intuition in accordance with the structure of the concept; this power is what Kant calls our "imagination." The imagination "apprehends" (takes up) what is given in intuition and then puts together or "combines" this diversity (or "manifold") so that it matches the concept. In this way the imagination "exhibits" (darstellen, traditionally rendered as "to present"11) the concept, i.e., provides it with a matching or "corresponding" intuition. (xxxv) The imagination, for Kant, synthesizes the data received from the outside world with the concept that, thanks to some earlier experience, is already available to the mind independently of the particular experience in question. Let us assume-albeit a bit prematurely-for example, that a cow is standing in a field. What is involved in "seeing" this cow? First, we receive certain sensory data. Next, these data are, so to speak, "fed through" the fundamental, a priori categories of space and time. Finally, this empirical intuition is matched by the imagination with the structure of the concept, "cow." We now have a match between the sensory data and the preexisting concept, and so are able to verify that we have indeed seen a cow. In workmanlike fashion, then, the Kantian Imagination allows us to verify that there is a basic harmony between mental categories and, if not the "real world," then at least our sensory experience of it. Coleridge's Imagination gives us access to knowledge far more glorious than that provided by Kant's: Coleridgean imagination reveals that the mind participates in the creation of the world. While Kant had implied only that "one can neither think without an object nor prove that objects in themselves exist independently of thought ," Coleridge is intent on proving imagination's capacity to obliterate the distinction between self and world. Imagination, in sum, is nothing less than the power of fusing subject and object into a unified whole. Notice that in the passage cited above, Coleridge describes the primary imagination as "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am." If we consider the primary imagination as it acts in the poet specifically, we see the great power Coleridge ascribes to poets and their work. In Genesis, God's creation of the universe is cast in terms of a grand performative "speech act" ("Let there be light," and so on). The world, then, was spoken into existence, and its continued existence through time implies that all creation is the perpetual unfolding of God's Word . In essence, the creative acts of the poet's mind do not merely imitate the processes of external nature; those acts actually repeat natural-i.e. divine-process. We are no longer dealing, as in earlier times, with a merely mimetic, mechanical doctrine about art - the poet does not copy external nature on the basis of rules derived from social or artistic convention and tradition; instead, there is an organic likeness between art and the divine processes of nature. Coleridge on Poetic Genius: Mechanic vs. Organic Form In Lectures from Shakespeare, Coleridge applies his ideas about the workings of imagination to the great dramatist, whom some later critics (especially the French) accused of being too wild and lawless for the good of his art or the audience. But Coleridge writes that Shakespeare does not create in such a lawless manner; his greatness does not come from what Alexander Pope vaguely describes as an ability to "snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." Rather, argues Coleridge, "No work of true genius dare want its appropriate form" (Norton 488). Mechanical form develops "ab extra," i.e. from the outside. A modern example of this would be mass-produced statuary -- a passive, material substance that has been altered in a purely mechanical way, without any suffusion of active imagination. Organic form, however - say in a great piece of music or a great poem, develops "ab intra," i.e. according to its own inner laws or nature. Just as an acorn becomes an oak, grows into its own true nature as contained potentially in the seed, so does a poetic composition mature into a completed poem by a similar process: it develops from the poet's own imagination. Listen to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and you will discern the kind of "organic form" that Coleridge theorizes: Beethoven exfoliates his famous opening three-note motif throughout the symphony in every way his immense genius can conceive; the entire symphony is a fleshing out of the initial theme. Similarly, we might consider an imaginative opposite to the mechanically produced statuary mentioned above: a great sculptor like Michelangelo of Rodin, we might say, confronts and shapes his material in processive acts of imagination: there must be a dynamic interplay between mind and matter that will manifest itself in the final shaping of clay or stone into a true work of art. Such examples illustrate for us the "how" of basic expressive theory; we see how imagination produces the written word or the note in accordance with its own laws. In sum, when Milton's Satan said in Paradise Lost, "The mind is its own place," seventeenth-century readers, along with Milton himself, put the statement down to heresy and rejection of God as author of all other beings and the cosmos; when Coleridge makes a modified, somewhat less impious, version of that point, we take him as a Romantic. Coleridge on Symbol and Allegory: towards the Social Value of Poetry Coleridge ascribes great creative power to the mind of the poet, and he says that a work of genius develops in accordance with its own inner laws. What, then, is the social function of such a work, created by the poetic or secondary imagination and following the laws of the poet's genius? To what extent can the written work of art heal the rifts in modern humankind's divided psyche, the rifts between human beings and their fellows? To see how Coleridge deals with the role of art in Western society, we must examine his notion of the symbol. In The Statesman's Manual of 1816, Coleridge makes a key distinction between mechanical allegory and living symbol: Now an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the sense . . . . On the other hand a symbol . . .is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative. (Norton 7th ed. 490) In A Glossary of Literary Terms, Fourth Edition (New York: Holt, 1981), Meyer Abrams says succinctly, "[B]oth Coleridge and Goethe stress that an allegory presents a pair of subjects (an image and a concept) and a symbol only one (the image alone); that the allegory is specific in its reference, while the symbol remains indefinite, but richly-even infinitely-suggestive in its reference; and also that for this very reason, a symbol is the higher mode of literary expression" (197). While allegory's operations call to mind the associational epistemology of John Locke, who argued that all knowledge arises from, and then builds upon, sensory experience in combinatory fashion, the symbol appears, in Coleridge's definition, to be invested with a being, an "ontological status" of its own. The poet's imagination brings something vital into being-the symbol and the work of art as a whole. Only the symbolic work puts the reader in touch with an otherwise inaccessible reality; the reader learns through poetry the power of his or her own mind to overcome the distinction between itself and the world outside, between its temporal limitations and eternity. In this way-through the symbolic poem-implies Coleridge, "[t]he poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity" (Norton 482). Coleridge's claims that the poet's creative imagination serves as a force uniting all other human beings, we can see by now, go much further than any of Kant's remarks about the importance of aesthetic judgment in human affairs. Allegory is a translation of one set of abstractions into another; it has no power to bring together mind and matter, subject and object. Allegorical productions never lead one beyond mere shadows, never allow one to hear "the annunciation of principles, of ideas . . . [at which] the soul of man awakes and starts up, as an exile in a far distant land at the unexpected sounds of his native language, when after long years of absence, and almost of oblivion, he is suddenly addressed in his own mother-tongue" (Portable Coleridge 387). Allegory gives us mere notions, a dead interplay between abstractions; but symbol is the living product of synthesizing imagination-it gives us access to ideas, living principles that spark life-sustaining enthusiasm. Religion, for Coleridge, seems to depend partially upon the capacity to understand scripture and all else in a symbolic manner. Here is an excellent set of passages from The Statesman's Manual in which Coleridge describes his own symbolic interpretation of a natural scene: [I]t has been the music of gentle and pious minds in all ages, it is the poetry of all human nature, to read . . . [the book of God's servant, Nature] likewise in a figurative sense, and to find therein correspondencies and symbols of the spiritual world. I have at this moment before me, in the flowery meadow, on which my eye is now reposing, one of its most soothing chapters, in which there is no lamenting word, no one character of guilt and anguish. For never can I look and meditate on the vegetable creation without a feeling similar to that with which we gaze at a beautiful infant that has fed itself asleep at its mother's bosom, and smiles in its strange dream of obscure yet happy sensations. The same tender and genial pleasure takes possession of me, and this pleasure is checked and drawn inward by the like aching melancholy, by the same whispered remonstrance, and made restless by a similar impulse of aspiration. It seems as if the soul said to herself: From this state hast thou fallen! Such shouldst thou still become, thy self all permeable to a holier power! thy self at once hidden and glorified by its own transparency, as the accidental and dividuous in this quiet and harmonious object is subjected to the life and light of nature; to that life and light of nature, I say, which shines in every plant and flower, even as the transmitted power, love and wisdom of God over all fills, and shines through, nature! . . . .But further, and with particular reference to that undivided reason, neither merely speculative or merely practical, but both in one, which I have in this annotation endeavoured to contra-distinguish from the understanding, I seem to myself to behold in the quiet objects, on which I am gazing, more than an arbitrary illustration, more than a mere simile, the work of my own fancy. I feel an awe, as if there were before my eyes the same power as that of the reason-the same power in a lower dignity, and therefore a symbol established in the truth of things. I feel it alike, whether I contemplate a single tree or flower, or meditate on vegetation throughout the world, as one of the great organs of the life of nature. Lo!-with the rising sun it commences its outward life and enters into open communion with all the elements, at once assimilating them to itself and to each other. At the same moment it strikes its roots and unfolds its leaves, absorbs and respires, streams forth its cooling vapour and finer fragrance, and breathes a repairing spirit, at once the food and tone of the atmosphere, into the atmosphere that feeds it. Lo!-at the touch of light how it returns an air akin to light, and yet with the same pulse effectuates its own secret growth, still contracting to fix what expanding it had refined. Lo!-how upholding the ceaseless plastic motion of the parts in the profoundest rest of the whole it becomes the visible organismus of the entire silent or elementary life of nature and, therefore, in incorporating the one extreme becomes the symbol of the other; the natural symbol of that higher life of reason, in which the whole series (known to us in our present state of being) is perfected, in which, therefore, all the subordinate gradations recur, and are re-ordained in more abundant honor . . . . (Portable Coleridge 393-94) In this difficult passage, Coleridge connects organic life, his own mind's powers, and the spiritual realm by means of his capacity to interpret nature as a symbol, as (to use Abrams' words) something "richly-even infinitely-suggestive in its reference." Coleridge reads nature as a symbol of "the higher life of reason" which in turn symbolizes humanity's aspiration toward its divine source. The symbol, as always, is both real in itself and indicative of something greater than itself. In Coleridge's terms, the symbol "partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible." If symbolic poetry has such great power to unite mind with matter, mind with mind, it is clear that in the view of Coleridge and his fellow romantics, that poetry holds out great hope for working transformations first in the individual and then in the wider human community. The somewhat less directly philosophical claim to this effect, of course, we may find in Wordsworth's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" of 1798 and 1802.
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