Coleridge and german philosophy the poet in the land of logic

In the commonly accepted interpretations of thedispute, the autonomy of philosophy from theology, the fact that it could say all it wanted to without theological assistance, incriminated

Coleridge and German Philosophy

Coleridge and

German Philosophy The Poet in the Land of Logic

Paul Hamilton

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of Philosophy 89Chapter 7: Reading from the Inside: Coleridge's

contemporary philosophical idiom 103Chapter 8: Spelling the World 121

Notes 139 Bibliography 161 Index 171

Abbreviations and works cited

Coleridge

Aids Aids to Reflection, edited by John Beer, CC9 (1993)

BL Biographia Literaria, edited by James Engell and W Jackson

Bate, 2vols, CC 7 (1985)

CC The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, general editor

Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series, 16 vols (PrincetonUniversity Press, 1971-2001) Individual volumes in theedition are given separate entries

CL The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Earl

Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1956-71)

CM Marginalia, edited by Heather Jackson and George Whalley, 6

parts, CC 12 (1980-2001)

CN The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed Kathleen Coburn, 5

vols Vol 4 edited by Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen;Vol 5 edited by Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding.Each vol is in two parts, text and notes (London: Routledgeand Kegan Paul, 1957-2002)

Lay Sermons, edited by Reginald James White, CC6 (1972) PhL Lectures 1818-1819: On the History of Philosophy, edited by J.R.

deJ.Jackson, 2 vols, CCS (2000) Logic Logic, edited by James Robert dejager Jackson, CC 13 (1981)

OM Opus Maximum, edited by Thomas McFarland, CC 15 (2002)

PW Poetical Works: Part 3 Plays, edited by J.C.C Mays and Joyce

Crick, 2 vols, CC 16 (2001) SWF Shorter Works and Fragments, edited by H.J.Jackson andj R de

Phenomenology G.W.F Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V Miller,

with an analysis of the text and foreword by J H Findlay(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)

Werke G.W.F Hegel, Werke, based on the edition of the Werke of

1832-45, newly edited version by Eva Moldenhauer and KarlMarkus Michel, 21 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970)

Kant

Werke I Kant, Werke, edited by Wilhehn Weischedel, 12 vols (Frankfurt

am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977)

Schelling

System F.WJ Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, introduction

by Michael Vater, translated by Peter Heath (Charlottesville:University of Virginia Press, 1978)

Werke F.WJ Schelling, Sdmmtliche Werke, edited by K.W.F Scheiling,

part I, vols 1-10, part II, vols 11-14 (Stuttgart: Cotta,1856-61)

I am very grateful to various people for ideas and help important to me thatthey probably were not aware of giving at the time, among them AndrewBowie, Howard Caygill, Jim Chandler, Lilla Crisafulli, Michael Kooy, PeterDews At Queen Mary University of London I have been fortunate in workingwith a cohort of inspiring graduate students who have never let me standstill Two current ones, Rowan Boyson and Molly Macdonald, kindly read andcommented on parts of the draft

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Patrick Hamilton 2005), who encouraged me to delight in a shared philosophical passion a long,long time ago

(1916-Chapter One

Coleridge in the Land of Logic

Coleridge and post-Kantianism

My Dream - History of Scotus, deranged as a youth / imagining himself in the Land of Logic, lying on the Road & in the Road to the Kingdom of Truth, falls into a criminal Intercourse with a Girl, who is in Love with him, whom

he considers as the Daughter of the King of the Land / - impersonation & absolute Incarnation of the most Abstract - Detected he defends himself on this ground O it was a wild dream, yet a deal of true psychological Feeling

at the bottom of it (CN, I, 1824)

This book is about Coleridge's informal philosophical adventures Informal in the sense that their systematic presentation was never completed, and also in the sense that their psychological satisfactions are palpable and approachable not exclusive and remote If we become familiar with the predominantly German philosophical idiom in which they appear, then their adventurousness merits the racy tale told in the Coleridgean epigraph above As this cryptic, early Notebook entry suggests, the story of Coleridge's philosophical connec- tions was always going to be complicated and compromised Spontaneously his intellectual biography assumes dramatic form, staged vicariously through the dream of another logician, Duns Scotus The contemporary master-trope of philosophical dispute in Coleridge's time was Pantheism Truth, as Schelling's major opponent in the revived quarrel over Pantheism, Jacobi, maintained, need not, perhaps should not, be gained philosophically If that is so, then philosophy can be accused of a sort of intellectual dalliance, at best distracting from true seriousness, at worst a 'criminal' pleasure A defence of philo- sophical activity, though, lies in Scotus' claim that such intercourse is in any case of such a degree of abstraction that its otherwise scandalous desire may actually coincide with an ultimate mission to understand the final things After all, 'impersonation 8c absolute Incarnation' describes accurately Schelling's alternative to Jacobi's theology: a God of becoming, one whose self-production

in shapes proportionate to human faculties of apprehension is what renders him a personal God, in line with the demands of Christian dogma.

I will frequently, however, try to avoid explaining Coleridge's philosophical adventures by attributing to him a partisan position within the repeatedly

reviving Pantheismusstreti, which Coleridgeans mostly know from McFarland's classic if engage account.1 Instead, I will concentrate on the eroticism ofColeridge's philosophical engagements, if you like; the sheer overwhelmingpleasure the man obviously took in surfing the waves of German idealismand post-Kantianism that followed each other in close succession A booktaking this approach is not going to be zealous in uncovering exact sources,preferring to look for the amplification by each other of Coleridgean andGerman philosophical views and ideas Coleridge's sympathies and antipathiestowards certain philosophical positions are not always extricable from eachother, as the guilty entanglement above suggests.

Especially significant here, for example, is the fact that, within the bounds

of the Pantheismusstreit, Schelling's response to Jacobi is both theologically

aggressive and insistent on the importance of philosophy Against his opponents,Schelling claims that philosophical inquiry is required for the adequate articu-lation of any theology worth considering (In the philosophical terminology

of the time, this amounts to saying that it must be possible to have a system offreedom, in which God's alterity is nevertheless connected to Reason.) It is ashort step from this to see philosophy as self-sufficient, capable of sketchingunaided the shape of ultimate explanation or of schematizing the limits ofwhat it is sensible to say In the commonly accepted interpretations of thedispute, the autonomy of philosophy from theology, the fact that it could say all

it wanted to without theological assistance, incriminated it The echoes of the

Atheismusstreit that had removed Fichte from his Chair at Jena, defeated

profes-sionally by the amateur Jacobi, must have constandy encouraged Schelling totranslate his grounding of Absolute philosophical justification into theologicalterminology

But it is also true to say that the absorption of theological speculation bycontemporary philosophical ontology endowed philosophy with all the passionand psychological investment normally associated with religion Scotus' infatu-ation was due to the degree of abstraction made erotically available throughits personal response to him Not the girl but the fact that she might be thedaughter of the King of Logic attracts him To do so, she must displace desirefrom its usual object, excusing the philosopher's lust by having it symbolize thebodily, affective relationship that takes over when we become intimate with thegenerative sources of logic or philosophy - so becoming both the most materialand least objective of objects of desire Our postmodern age is comparably

interested in the mobility of affect, or, following modernist Dinggedichte, the

possible superiority of representation to original as a source of vividness or astandard of intensity The Romantic philosophers after Kant rather understoodthe necessity of representation to symbolize, as in Wordsworth's 'ImmortalityOde', an ultimate grounding exceeding representation and so only graspablethrough affect rather than knowledge And Coleridge was one of that post-Kantian company, involved in the controversies of just what was to count as alegitimate exercise in ontological disclosure and what was not In Wordsworth'scase, Coleridge always seemed to think that the jury was still out

Coleridge in the Land of Logic 3

Writing to T.S Eliot at a time when he was finishing his own book onColeridge, IA Richards told the poet that he had found what he wanted inColeridge but that he'd had to use a fair amount of coercion Richards' bookwas a critically epochal discussion that moderated major critical debates of histime Mine cannot claim that importance; but it does try in its more modestway to use Coleridge in a comparably instrumental manner as the point ofmany departures and returns, and looks for the same tolerance or latitudefrom the reader First it sets Coleridge's mode of thinking within a GermanRomantic philosophical context as the place where his ideas can naturallyextend themselves, stretch and find speculations with which to comparethemselves Secondly, it argues and it is hoped wins converts to the idea thatColeridge found philosophical speculation in the dominant idiom of his timesexciting, vertiginous and as imaginatively engaging as poetry We are accus-tomed to looking for the philosophical possibilities in poetry, encouraged bythat overriding ambition of writing a philosophical poem shared by Coleridgeand Wordsworth But the siren power of philosophical writing, its indigenouschallenge to our responsive readerly constitution perhaps gets underestimated

or taken for granted in the Romantic rush to find in poetry the measure ofeverything Philosophy for Coleridge had to be already engrossing for itspoetic absorption to be so important an aim 'Not only the poet but also the

philosopher has his raptures {EntzuckungenY wrote Schelling in The Ages of the

of his own system or enslavement by another man's Coleridge, when timeswere fraught (most of the time) could express this dependency dramatically.'My nature requires another Nature for its support, & reposes only in anotherfrom the necessary Indigence of its being.'3 But, in the philosophy of thetime, this drama was being extracted from its pathology and given theoreticallegitimacy The notion that the creative act, however much it appeared to beindividual, was actually collaborative, was developed in different directions.The Romantic construction of the unconscious (a performance once plausibly

attributed to Biographia Literaria by Catherine Belsey) endowed original

expression with an afterlife it could not have intended.4 The critical reception'sextension of significance beyond a piece of writing's stated purpose, whetherthat statement be the author's or the implication of the work's genre, removedthe writing from the jurisdiction of both Nevertheless, new interpretationsand the critical fecundity of great art across time still reflected favourably uponthe artistic reserves of the maker Neither subject nor object held sway here,since the ontology of the work partook equally of both Meanings which wereunconscious at the time of the work's inception were revealed to the artist byhis or her work, the object here taking priority But these illuminations only

made sense, only identified themselves, by illustrating things belonging to the prior initiative that produced the work This dramatic interchange, in which

an aesthetic work is always further realized by the efforts of others - ously - normalizes Coleridgean 'Indigence' Formulated at critical moments

vicari in Friedrich Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragment 116 and almost simultaneously

at the crux of Schelling's System of 1800, plundered by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria - this progressive dialectic of the unconscious unleashes the plurality

of self-expression.

Drama also underwrites the fact that the critical elaboration of an original can take place in another idiom Post-Kantianism did not consider that to reinterpret was necessarily to reduce the living spirit of something to the dead letter of exposition The hard-won doctrine of aesthetic autonomy emerging

from Kant's third Critique and most memorably deployed by Friedrich Schiller

would seem to endorse this isolation of the aesthetic 'object' from subsequent criticism of it But post-Kantianism was a philosophical battleground in which the master himself was subjected to the logic of the vicarious, or the various ways in which his successors spoke through him or in his spirit Coleridge agreed with Kant that ideas of reason were uncontainable within our under- standing; but he followed those who transformed the regulative effect to which Kant restricted our apprehension of ideas into a sense of their progressiveness and productivity Ideas embodied 'an infinite power of semination' Coleridge had to devise a new rhetorical term to pinpoint the permanent ideality so infinitely differentiated He called it 'tautegory' Tautegory could be used to describe the expansion into many discourses, under the pressure of historical difference, of an Absolute truth originally only revealed in one discourse 5

Coleridge notoriously tried to shuttle between poetry and philosophy, theology and science, criticism, politics and just about everything else available He would have agreed, surely, with Friedrich Schlegel that poetry's inherently dramatic dimension gave the lead to other discourses to collaborate, join forces, amalgamate and help form the new mythology needed for intellection

to be adequate to modern reality 6

Coleridge's most comprehensive descriptors of this ambition were words

like Logos, Logosophia, anti-babel, even 'the last possible epic, The Fall of Jerusalem' 7 For Friedrich Schlegel and the Jena group of 1798-1800, ideas were 'the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts', but this drama was already recruiting a still wider cast 8 The 'anti-babel' is perhaps the most fruitful of Coleridge's wish-list to pursue here In the first paragraph of

the 'Transcendental Doctrine of Method' of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant

fascinatingly regarded the preceding 'Doctrine of Elements', or dental deduction of the conditions necessary for experience to be possible, as

transcen-an 'estimate (Vorrat) of the building materials' required for the Babel of pure

reason he had been critiquing While we can think 'the idea' of such a totality, the materials at our disposal restrict us to building on 'the plane of experience' instead More than this, though, 'the confusion of languages that unavoidably divided the workers over the plan, and dispersed them throughout the world,

Coleridge in the Land of Logic 5

[left] each to build on his own according to his design' 9 Coleridge's notebook entry 3254, examined in Chapter 4, must 'build' on Kant's metaphor It was precisely this given idea of experience that the post-Kantians, starting with Fichte, wanted to understand progressively They wanted to do this by breaking down the isolation of discursive disciplines from each other, and getting them

to engage in dramatic dialogue From Fichte onwards, ideas of production began to circumscribe those of representation Kant had analysed the manifold necessary for cognition to work and the dialectical tractability of reality this functionality was obliged to assume His successors studied the dynamic production of the former by the latter Imprisoned as Kant thinks we are within representation, the 'X' outside representation must be, as he says, 'nothing for us' 10 Their answer to this ban is to develop out of Kant's other critiques

of aesthetic and teleological judgement a productive rather than tional paradigm of correspondence The consequent striving of cognition to get on terms with its own production energizes a drama present from Fichte's

representa-Wissenschaftslehre (Science of Knowledge, versions from 1794 onwards) to Hegel's

1806 Phenomenology 11 Between these two, more and more discursive resources are requisitioned for the task The delegation or relay of purely philosophical authority matches that of the subject For of course the subject must be still unconscious of what remains its potential, though a potential which, like Schlegel's prophetic historian, we must think of as the productive future in our past We only need to look at the exorbitant criteria Coleridge sets the unfor- tunate Wordsworth for the creation of the philosophical poem he thought he

should have written instead of The Excursion to feel the exhilarating pressure of

the post-Kantian idea to create a concerted but indeterminate discursive front

in pursuit of ends of which it was evidently not fully conscious 12

If philosophy's ultimate task is to explain not only how we represent the world, but how we think the production of those representations rather than others, then it has something close to a creation-myth on its hands This can lead in many directions, not all of them doctrinal ones For a Christian like Coleridge, though, theoretical discourses closest to a theodicy would feel the most benign But while Coleridgean knowledge is, according to the famous

climax of the first volume of Biographia Literaria, a finite repetition of 'the

infinite I AM', this acceptance of being spoken is close to anxieties Coleridge was voicing before reading the Germans, anxieties heard louder after he had read them and published and re-published the mystery poems, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan' in 1816-17 In the fourth

of the Philosophical Lectures of 1819, Coleridge sets out an acceptable version of

truth's divine ventriloquism.

/ know, intuitively know, that there is a power essential to my nature, and

which is 'I ought, I ought not, I should not', and that voice is original and self-existent, not an echo of a prior voice (I mean the voice of prudential

self-love) but the very source out of which self-love must flow (PhL, I,

178)

This passage sounds uncharacteristically Fichtean in its reliance on conscience,but the use of 'love' to validate our Very source7 suggests Schelling's moralpsychology The mystery poems, though, play through various ideas ofrepetition, and in their narratives the meaning of repetition ranges fromthe progressive domestication of an original dynamism in 'Kubla Khan' tothe fear of an imposing instrumentalism evident in the other two In TheRime', puzzling in its mixture of arbitrariness and moralizing, 'an enigma

in the form of an explanation', repetition is the master-trope at all levels.13

However accepting and resigned the mariner's homily at the end appears, he

is nevertheless driven by the desire to re-tell his tale for his chosen audience, asforcefully as the dead crew of his ship had been possessed to man their stationsagain Indeed, Anna Maria Cimitile has recendy argued from a knowledgeablyEuropean theoretical perspective, that insofar as the poem's central fantasyreflects upon itself in the poem it produces a spectral slavery.14 In the context

of Coleridge's post-Kantianism, the spectral quality of slavery in fact locates it

in Coleridge's deepest anxieties about the human power lovingly to accept itsdetermination or vocation Far from dematerializing slavery, the spectral aspectlets it stand for the most fundamental violation Coleridge could imagine - asavage perversion of that amiable dispensation normally allowing us to enjoy aself-determining human subjectivity in the act of representing its production

of us As Cimitile states simply: 'Slavery is the absence of subjectivity'.15 Thatthe poem appears unconscious of its indictment of the slave trade lets slaveryfigure for the post-Kantian philosopher the blighting of all past and futuresources of human possibility

'Christabel' also dramatizes the fear of being spoken by another, herepresented as the unpleasant contraction of the individual, like a dove beingclasped by a snake, the movement of their breathing indistinguishable.Geraldine, the snake, then substitutes for Christabel, the dove, and provesher success by engaging in an otherwise incestuous dalliance with Christabel'sfather, Sir Leoline The impossibly elfin child at the end spells out the impli-cations 'Kubla Khan' moves through a succession of re-enactments of anoriginally unfocused creative energy without reaching resolution Coleridge'sthree great mystery poems appear caught in a sceptical philosophical moment.Their trademark reflexivity - the extent to which they are about their ownproduction - is curiously dubious about its own achievement Their circu-larity, far from providing exemplary images of self-production, suggests thelimitations of purely imaginative solutions and encourages a readership whichwill be culturally urbane enough to appreciate this progressive self-criticism.Certainly, this lx>ok argues in the next chapter, both Schelling on Dante andHegel on scepticism help us fill out a picture of the reading skills Coleridge'spoems require Such skill is above all historicist: the talent to detect thepersistence of the past in the present, its creative repetitions constructed to anew finitude, and gesturing towards a future Schelling's fullest exposition of

this historicism took place in his unpublished masterpiece The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) which remained in draft form after his death Coleridge, as the

Coleridge in the Land of Logic 7 editors of his Marginalia point out, would have heard of it because Schelling describes his essay Ueber die GoUheiten von Samothrace as a supplement to Die WeUaUer, and Coleridge read that.16 But Coleridge appears to find his own way

of expressing the historicist possibilities for Schellingian philosophy after the

Freedom essay and Schelling's reworking of its main thought against Jacobi in the Denkmal a few years later Coleridge calls the identity persisting through

historical changes an 'idea'; he thinks of the changes as 'infinite semination'.The rhetorical figure capable of symbolizing such exchanges is a 'tautegory'.The social class he invented to make the study of tautegory, or permanence

in progression, its profession and something it embodied, was to be the'Qerisy'

The road-mapThe following chapters try to make good these claims about Coleridge andthe German philosophical context I use to explain each other.17 Inevitablyboosted by supplements from marginalia, letters and notebooks, which the

Bollingen edition of the Collected Coleridge makes so freely available, the book focuses on central prose texts by Coleridge - Biographia Literaria, The Friend, the Opus Maximum - and keeps re-examining some of the major poems along with

Coleridge's own conflicted analysis of Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode' Theseare the main areas of concentration The first chapter writes Coleridge intothe German philosophical background with some determination Hegel is aneglected figure in Coleridgean studies No wonder, since Coleridge only read

a few pages of his work But Hegel, especially in his Phenomenology, remains

not only the foremost commentator on the speculations of his age, but makesout of that commentary his own philosophy For Coleridge's eclectic thinking

to be out of the loop here would therefore be unusual One of the benefits

of the freedoms this book takes with a conventional history of ideas is to keepColeridge in the Hegelian picture to which he evidently belongs.18 Coleridge'sphilosophizing only comes fully alive within the ambit of that of his avant-gardeGerman contemporaries Coleridge's favouring of Schelling only reveals its fullforce if we know about the intellectual quarrel between Schelling and Hegel.All Coleridge's other intellectual borrowings and investments do not reallyset up an alternative theoretical establishment: but they do fuel his power tointervene in the dominant philosophical idiom of the time

Schelling, though, was the post-Kantian philosopher of dynamic productivitymost congenial to Coleridge The explanation of the two imaginations and

fancy central to Biographia Literaria lose their main philosophical force unless

they are referred back to Schelling's ontological explanation of the world asthe doubling and repetition in differentiated form of an original identity

After Biographia Literaria, Coleridge began disparaging Schelling in earnest, especially the scheme of Schelling's Freedom essay which was the published

culmination of Schelling's philosophy up to that date (1809) and the basis of its further development in unpublished seminars, written drafts and lectures for the next 45 years As Raimonda Modiano points out, Coleridge's letters

to J.H Green distancing himself from Schelling seem founded on a reading

of the much earlier Einleitung of 1799 He also seems to buy into Jacobi's

argument that Schelling perpetuates the elenchia - or what Modiano calls a 'violation of hierarchical standards' - of deducing a superior power from an inferior one 19 But it is the Freedom essay he admired that lies behind notebook

entries such as the following.

In short, Schelling's System and mine stand thus:- in the latter there are God and Chaos: sind in the former an Absolute Somewhat, which is alternately both, the rapid leger de main shifting of which constitutes the delusive appearance of Poles (CAT, 4,4662)

Here, Schelling's polar logic is an illusion; so is Schelling's idea that God is grounded in an Unconscious prior to putting on his individuality, a reserve

on which subsequent tautegorical repetitions draw Coleridge, desiring more explicit revelation, thinks this leaves 'all hanging in frivolous & idle sort.

Schwebend.' (CN, 4,4664)

This seems pretty clear-cut Coleridge Christianizes Schelling's ontology, replacing its logic with doctrine Two considerations should give us pause though Firstly, as just noted, Coleridge was always fascinated in his poetry by images of how f productivity could go wrong, those scenarios of instrumentalism from which we needed Christian virtue to rescue us In other words, he appears

to look for ways of describing how we can seek the chaos behind benign creativity, as if we could choose from it another creative purpose, one enslaving others to its selfish interest Secondly, Coleridge's use of tautegory, and (as we shall see) Schelling's later appropriation of it, show him continuing to practise Schelling's 'leger de main' in ways Schelling recognized and appreciated Coleridge, here as elsewhere, participates in post-Kantianism so as to return it constantly to the issue of expression His early dramatic writings are already part of a project in line with his philosophical interests When the philosophy begins to enlist different discourses in the service of new standards

of theoretical adequacy, it translates the earlier sense of dramatic interplay into its own idiom Chapter 3, 'Drama as the Motor of Romantic Theory', examines how this happens Dramatic philosophy takes place in a setting traditionally thought hostile to drama because of the typically Romantic habit of intro- spection In fact, post-Kantian theory brings the two together, and the dialogic quality of self-understanding, an idea going back to Shaftesbury, is explored The self, eluding conclusive representation, is more like a play we produce than a single character This insight connects with the larger post-Kantian strategies for de;iling with questions of ontology.

The next chapter, 'Coleridge's Stamina', examines Coleridge's central metaphor for the 'ideas' with which his writing - poetical, philosophical,

Coleridge in the Land of Logic 9

political - strove to get on terms Usually, 'ideas' are tied exclusively to such locutions of Coleridge and Goethe as 'the translucence of the general / universal in the particular / individual' The strains this claim for represen- tation puts on its symbolism are evident, and the claims of symbol have been conspicuously critiqued in twentieth-century theory from Walter Benjamin to Paul de Man I reconsider that critique and argue that it must not be allowed

to let the productive, historicist dimension contrived for symbol by Coleridge and Schelling to be effaced Then, in Chapter 5, Coleridge's literary autobi- ography, Coleridge's 'Coleridge', is read as a case study of Coleridge's power

to evoke the production of a self and to use it as a model for philosophical

understanding His autobiography is presented as a biography, as a Biographia,

and that impersonality along with the writing's dramatic exercises in vicarious expression are again argued to connect fruitfully with the complexities of the post-Kantian critique of representation generally.

Around the time he published Biographia Literaria, Coleridge also projects his 'rifacciamento' or re-making of The Friend This endeavour is far more than

the 1818 revival of the periodical of a decade earlier In renewing his idea of philosophical friendship, Coleridge's plot appears to be, overall, to explore the role of affect in philosophical explanation His admiration for and distrust

of Kant's alleged Stoicism, already a topic in my earlier chapters, is clarified through Coleridge's stipulation of relationship and communication as funda- mental requirements of the concept of truth There is a helpful conjuncture here with recent postmodern discussions of friendship as the politics for an age

in which politics appears in need of rehabilitation.

How contemporary are Coleridge's philosophical concerns? Occasionally, I find it necessary and easy to slip into the idiom of modern and postmodern thinkers and their areas of interest (Heidegger and Wittgenstein on ontology, Derrida on friendship, Deleuze on Stoicism) The penultimate chapter, 'Reading from the Inside', looks both at the details of Coleridge's construction

of 'tautegory' and at its transmission through different critical reading practices and theory to the present day While reading from inside an oblig- atory conceptual framework, European philosophy has always felt the need

to address our sense of these boundaries, and the kind of delegations of its own authority it has to make to other discourses in order to evoke what for a monologic philosophy, bound to the task of explaining the logic of represen- tation, must, as we heard Kant say earlier, remain 'nothing for us'.

Many, though, have suspected this degree of philosophical inclusiveness and generosity as it appeared in Schelling Friedrich Engels, a member of the audience of Schelling's late Berlin lectures, found him to be all things to all people 'Protean' is another ambiguous adjective to have been applied Karl Jaspers pointed out, more sympathetically, Schelling's trick of gesturing

as much outside his current system as making his present one cohere from within Schelling is currently in vogue Two recent, indeed overlapping, books

on the 'new' Schelling - new as in the 'new' Nietzsche, Bergson and Sartre

- indicate an intensity of interest which builds on a continuous revival from

Heidegger onwards.20 Evident is a willingness to discount Schelling's apparentmysticism in the interests of foregrounding something else: the discursive mix

it takes - aesthetic, ethical, mythological, psychoanalytical, theological - tomake that existential apprehension, discovered by philosophy but beyond itspowers of expression, remain credible Coleridge in his way began the workneeding to be done here, with his ideas about tautegory

Hegel, arguably, is always new Certainly the episode of the Phenomenobgy

that his critics use to try to explode his system changes over time Postmodernthinkers like Deleuze elaborate a Stoic resistance to conceptual principleintended to go beyond Hegel's power to control For Alexandre Kojeve andhis existentialist followers it had been the master/slave episode which theyhad tried to elaborate unmanageably Otherwise a totalizing Hegel, intolerant

of the individual's right to resist generalization, supervenes But still morerecently, re-appraisals like Gillian Rose's have theorized more persuasively thesaving gaps and theoretical openings in Hegel's logic so as to recover a trulyspeculative Hegel Hegel's self-departures from his own system, it is argued,can be attributed to him It is the peculiar nature of the speculative propo-sition, formally postulated but never investigated across different discourses,that allows Hegel to take credit for the speculative provisionality his criticshave otherwise opposed to his system Hegel, while writing across many

historical discourses in the Phenomenology, is reticent (and restricted to formal investigation in the Science of Logic) about the implications for philosophical

expression of such speculation Again, as with Schelling, this leaves work to bedone which Coleridge, with his inveterate recourse to discussions of language,helps inaugurate

The final chapter looks at Coleridge's mode of addressing the lative problem at its broadest, using Schelling, Hegel and Wordsworth asthe most helpful points of orientation Coleridge's conclusion that 'ourmodern philosophy is spelling throughout' competes with the virtuosity ofWordsworth's 'Immortality Ode' when it tries to make poetry adequate tothe task of describing us Absolutely In its approach to the poetic challenge,philosophy, to use current analytic terminology, can be either foundational

specu-or anti-foundational: it can claim a privileged grounding in truth specu-or it can

be willing to delegate its authority in order to make possible the evocation ofwhat philosophy can uniquely think but not express In the latter mode it canconcede to other ways of writing the function of ascertaining an Absolute that

by definition exceeds the powers of its own discernment It can live vicariously.Poetry, when epistemological on its own account, can only be foundational.21

When does one hear of poets opting for the strategically prosaic in order to getacross an especially poetic felicity? Coleridge worries that a foundational poeticcontact with what we Absolutely are, necessarily immediate, would rendersuch ultimate authenticity as a sort of nonsense, epitomized by Wordsworth's'child Philosopher' of the 'Immortality Ode' 'What we call knowledge', wrote

Schelling in the 'Introduction' to the third draft of the Weltalter, is 'more of

a striving toward knowledge than knowledge itself like Wordsworth in his

Coleridge in the Land of Logic 11

famous remarks to Isabella Fenwick on the 'Ode', he described 'anamnesis'

as the goal producing this philosophical quest to get behind itself Coleridgeworries that Wordsworth's own poetic striving towards the same Platonic goaltakes the immediacy of its own poetic success to be a sign of immediate episte-mological success - what Tim Milnes calls 'a philosophy-transcending "poetic"truth'.22

Another way of putting this, Hegel's way, is to say that immediacy, underanalysis, empties itself of the particular 'here and now' supposed to demon-strate its certainty It becomes uniform and universal in its range of reference

It is always the same because our guarantee of its truth is that it has no need ofmediating characteristics which might distinguish its examples and occasions.Intriguingly, though, Schelling launched an attack on Hegel's entire system on

much the same grounds There is, Schelling argued in his Lectures on Modern Philosophy, a sameness about the presence of the Absolute at each stage of Hegel's Phenomenology, a common principle of contradiction rather than a

something new each time on analogy with the continual development of apersonality out of an unconscious past Schelling here is seeking to use thephilosophical nuclear option of the time against Hegel, the accusation ofPantheism God in everything means that everything, theologically, is the same.Particular differences go by the board, as a truth for which mediation is irrel-evant is therefore allowed to shine through all things in equal measure This isextremely close to Coleridge's attack on Wordsworth's 'Ode' Pantheism doesnot let us make sense of the world

The speculative Hegel has his own means of escaping this attack Wordsworth'sdefence, or the best one that we can find for him, is to attack: to defeat philosophicalobjection with the winning sufficiency of his poetry Schelling and Coleridge couldargue that Wordsworth's bid for universal authority just looks eccentric His 'Ode'retains the particular, idiomatic character which it was its Absolute project to shed.Wordsworth would do better to charge our ordinary usage with the numinous thandevise unbelievable characters and scenarios Adorno commended a language that

in its descriptions could be simultaneously 'identical and non4dentical' Resumingthe post-Kantian tradition, he argued that 'through the deity, language is trans-

formed from tautology to language' P After Nietzsche, after theology, he must have

thought, we are still left with the burden of maintaining non-identity if language

is to flourish To avoid tautology, our language has to cultivate in us, as Coleridgewanted it to do, the power to respond to historical change without slavish acqui-escence in the prescriptions of civilization we have inherited Our 'cultivation' is

the central mission of the Clerisy in Coleridge's On the Constitution of the Oiurth and State According to the Idea of Each (1830) But to opt out of identity altogether,

certain of our unaided, immediate poetic grasp of ourselves outside the limitatioris

of identity, won't do either We cannot disport ourselves with Wordsworth's poeticchildren in some utterly liminal landscape without hypostatizing in effect anotheridentity, an impossibly Absolute one

So, finally, has Coleridge won and Wordsworth lost? The answer offered

by the post-Kantian thinking this book studies is that this contest is actually

a collaboration Both sides are part of a movement in which, over time, asSchlegel and others argued, both can vacate their original positions for new,more composite forms of speech Wordsworth's poetry can tell us of ourunquenchable and self-defeating desires for our immediate reconciliationwith our destiny Coleridge's philosophy heightens our sense of the impos-sibility of such a vocation and the strangely indefensible intellectual postures

to which it drives us Wordsworth's poetry can then rid us of this feeling ofbeing ridiculous by its unanswerable exhibition of a need and longing which,

he persuades us, we do indeed experience Coleridge questions the credentials

of that experience to call itself experience, and Wordsworth finds for thosedoubts an existential expression And so the process continues, tautegori-cally rather than tautologically, the same only different each time Poetry andphilosophy are each other's extension They are on the stage, at the same time,

in dramatic dialogue The reader of both is the winner

Chapter Two

Coleridge's Philosophical Moment

The Difference between Fichte and Schelling

When Coleridge excitedly told Thomas Poole in a famous letter of 1801 that he had * extricated' the notions of Time and Space, and overthrown the doctrine of the association of ideas or mainstay of British empiricist psychology along with its (associated) determinist metaphysics, he was also describing his entry into the arena of German philosophy 1 Not that the Germans noticed For Coleridge, though, the break was obviously revelatory Crabb Robinson describes how 'a German friend' listening to Coleridge's 1811 lectures convinced him that 'Coleridge's mind is much more German than English My friend has pointed out striking analogies between Coleridge and German authors whom Coleridge has never seen ,' 2 The corollary of this would be Coleridge's frequent claims that he found Kant and the post-Kantians anticipated by earlier philosophers,

by Bruno, Boehme, the Cambridge Platonists and others His point, although expressed with his customary mixture of apology, rivalry and emulation, seems,

in effect, to be less about precedence and more about his enjoyment of the contemporary German idiom in which he found perennial philosophical concerns updated and historically expressive.

Coincidentally, in the same year as Coleridge's coup de foudne, Hegel was

also trying to extricate himself from his native philosophical inheritance In

his essay on The Difference Between Fichtes and ScheUing's Systems of Philosophy, he

championed Schelling's development of the 'spirit' of Kant's philosophy over Fichte's In early letters (1795) to Hegel from the Tubingen Stift, the educa- tional establishment he attended with Hegel and Holderlin, Schelling wrote of

an entrenched fidelity to the letter of Kant's philosophy, and of the contrary need to discover the premises of which Kant's philosophy may have given the result, but which it itself lacked 3 In the variable of 'spirit' also lay hidden the growth that was to culminate in Hegel's first major philosophical achievement,

the Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 By then Hegel had broken with Schelling,

and Schelling was on the way to criticizing Hegel's own philosophy as too idealist, too focused on conceptual possibility and neglectful of ontology: those

'premises' or ultimately prior explanations of the astonishing fact that anything exists rather than what it has become Potentially mystical, this ontological focus on the determination or attunement (the German Bestimmungcarries the

same vocational loading) of existence powered not only Kierkegaard's tialism but also Marx's materialism, in which nature is characterized not by its(Hegelian) logical essentials but by its potential to be historically transformedinto our authentic reality Human beings, thought the young Marx, overcametheir alienation under capitalism by transforming nature into their properabode Thus they allowed their true natural history - their determination

existen-as a species being - to begin.4 Hegel's break with a Fichtean version of Kant

is one of the first moments provoking the new ways of thinking.5 Coleridgesides with Schelling and Hegel against Fichte, and eventually with Schellingagainst Hegel, although he can be placed illuminatingly within Hegel'sspeculative history The critique of Fichte, though, expresses itself as thereinterpretation of Kant, and Coleridge shares this post-Kantian philosophicalself-understanding too

According to Hegel in his 1801 Difference essay, Fichte's Wissenschaftslekre or

'Science of knowledge' drew the full implications latent in two related tenets

of Kant's philosophy Kant thought that the categories of the understandingpossessed absolute jurisdiction in questions of knowledge Kant also claimed

that a transcendental unity of apperception - an 'I think' accompanying all

acts of understanding - was necessary for any experience to be possible.Experience had to belong, had to be someone's, could not be free-floating.Joined together by Fichte, these two precepts generated the notion of anAbsolute subject or possessor of the exemplary experience It is a short step tosay that knowledge and experience are nothing other than the self-positing ofthis Absolute Nature then becomes for Fichte merely the 'not-F, the negative

of self-projection, posited in order for understanding to have something to actupon What the self-conscious 'I' simultaneously knows is an effect of its ownactivity As long as that activity continues, the 'not-F will never be conclusivelyunderstood Schelling appropriated this picture of the production of realityfrom a developing ground of which we are never fully conscious But he tookthe Fichtean striving out of the exclusively subjective realm at the expense ofthe coherence of Fichte's system This was no failure on Schelling's part, assome commentators have thought, but what Schelling wanted to do - to recon-ceive ideas of philosophical adequacy outside received notions of system.6

In his final formulation, Fichte calls the production of 'not-F from T an

1 original duplicity'.7 In Hegel's critical view, such a merger only added anothertier to 'the philosophical construction' of the faculty doing the synthesis.8 Totry to amalgamate reflection with action in this way did not make Fichte's realityany less ideal Schelling thought Fichte failed, and exploited that failure Hegelthought that Fichte remained consistently a philosopher of reflection, and thathis system remained static and unhistorical as a result Hegel's own phenom-enology exhaustively analysed all the historical varieties of self-consciousnessand the worlds they implied But then he arguably doubled Fichte's negation

to show the reverse production of the 'I' from the 'not-I' or realm of 'Spirit'(the not * not-I') whose progress was then recounted by the rest of his phenom-enology As soon as 'Spirit' becomes an independently productive agent, it

Coleridge's Philosophical Moment 15

is no longer just an epiphenomenon of the T, such as the 'not-I', but hasbecome the negation of that negation Coleridge seems to have found his way

round these difficult negatives on his own In a note to Fichte's Grundlage, he

asked pertinently: 'Is not a portion of the Obscurity of the Wissenschaftslehreattributable to the choice of the "Ich" instead of Soul or Spirit?'

Coleridge's note then continues in Schellingian terms: 'With the T we ually connect the present Potence of Consciousness'.9 Potenzen or potencies

habit-were the different powers of the Absolute (in analogy with the mathematicalidea of numbers to the power of their squares, cubes etc.) as it manifested itself

at different levels of existence - mineral, chemical, animal, psychological Hegel

preferred to record these variables as the history of Spirit But in the Difference

essay Hegel appreciated Schelling's move to save nature from entire absorptioninto the philosophy of the Fichtean subject Nor did Schelling's nature exist

in itself, so as through some final potency to encompass subjectivity as well.The Absolute was the identity of both subject and object: whatever continuumthey shared in order to make their comparison, identification or oppositionpossible This, at any rate, is the emphasis that distinguishes Schelling's earlier

Naturphilosophie from the Identitdtsphilosophie, 'identity philosophy', in which it

became incoporated Coleridge's note to Fichte clearly places him inside thisdebate, exercised by its options and possible variants

Coleridge's marginalia tend to be aggressive He affects astonishment at Kant's

betises Fichte is roundly castigated and repeatedly compared unfavourably with

Kant So is Jacobi, and his attack on the Kantian and post-Kantian tradition

in Uber die gottlkhen Dinge is marked down as ungenerous despite its evident

anti-Pantheistic stance But then Jacobi is defended in Coleridge's notes to

Schelling's response in his Denkmat, and, generally, Coleridge's hostility to

Schelling grows in proportion to the closeness with which his thought glossesColeridge's own fundamentally religious orientation It is just after his copious

use of Schelling and criticism of Fichte in Biographia Literaria that he tells

J.H Green that 'Fichte was far nearer the truth than Schelling'.10 Coleridge's

conflicted reception is especially obvious with Schelling's Freiheitschrift or

Freedom essay (Untersuchungen uber das Wesen des menschiichen Freiheit) where

Schelling's escape from Pantheism, and his appropriation of an incipientlyTrinitarian structure for ontology is not immediately congenial to Coleridge.Coleridge still told Henry Crabb Robinson in 1812 that Schelling was at his

'greatest' in this work Yet in his annotations to Schelling's Denkmal he can

be as reluctant as Jacobi had been to engage with the broad argument of the

Freedom essay His sweeping claims that Schelling's 'uncouth mysticism' simply

reworks Kant's explanation of freedom as 'the paramouncy of the Reason overthe Will' refuses Schelling any advance on his predecessor and rules out ofcourt his actual advance with Kantian disapproval.11

At this point, the temptation for Coleridge's reader is confidently to offerun-philosophical explanations for Coleridge's barbed and defensive attitudes.Clearly he feels threatened He displaces his worries about his own originalityonto speculations about Schelling's unacknowledged indebtedness to Jakob

Boehme, a Coleridgean tic convincingly documented by Norman Fruman in his attack on Coleridge's plagiarisms 12 Thomas McFarland famously maintained that Coleridgean rhetoric always argued a measured intellectual fastidiousness;

an unwillingness to subscribe to any individual, finished systematic exposition

in philosophy because of his profound suspicion (shared byjacobi) that such completeness falls in with monism Philosophical monism can be idealist or realist, positing a reduction of reality to what is either conceptually or naturally possible For Jacobi and Coleridge, this Spinozistic ambition left us no logical room for the idea of an external God free to welcome us to the otherworldly provision or afterlife in which Coleridge needed so desperately to believe But Schelling in particular shows a way out of this impasse, opening up an area of Being about which, since it remains undifferentiated, Coleridge can think what

he likes But, in a way, that freedom is the problem, because, unlike Schelling, Coleridge wants to be able to exert doctrinal control even over this area of ultimate liberty.

Many of Coleridge's personal remarks in marginalia, striking in their assumed intimacy - of the form 'a man of Kant's / Jacobi's / Schelling's genius would not etc' - might well derive from his recurring sense that they were articulating a sequence in the history of thought to which he belonged; a moment in which he was embedded, an over-arching 'Spirit', as Hegel put

it explicitly, in which his own individuality needed to inhere The mixture

of subjection and empowerment this historicity entailed then pressurized his readings of others 'What may not an ingenious man make out against another', wrote Coleridge in Schelling's margins, 'if he will put his own definitions on the other's words' 13 But this sensitivity to translation informs everything Coleridge wrote about other philosophers and, indeed, seems to

be what he thinks they are up to Schelling (in the Darlegung), for example,

reinterprets Kant 'in the Spirit of Kant' despite claiming a closer affinity to the best of Fichte 14 In this context, the word 'Spirit' suggests a Hegelian category historically overriding the individual's own introspective certainty of what he

or she is on about Coleridge himself wanted to have Schelling in 'common life words', although the pleasure he took in Kant's severe review of Herder's history shows his antipathy to the 'metacritical' practice, stemming from Hamann and Herder, of taking a stand against the 'Spirit of Kant' by opposing Kant's philosophical departures from ordinary language 15 When Coleridge was confident of imposing his own terminology on Schelling, he drew on the Christian pattern to which he believed that Schelling's thought, to be correct, must conform He is, I believe, at his most hostile when he thought Schelling was doing things the other way round, and approving Christian theology when

it mirrored philosophical arguments to which, in order to be correct, it must

conform 16

Or Coleridge's inveterate habit of desynonymizing could appear to have a life of its own Coleridge thought that 'the inconveniency of using one word for two Relations' meant that Schelling often 'equivocates', exhibiting 'the ill effects of an ambiguous (i.e double meaning) word even on highest minds' 17

Coleridge *s Philosophical Moment 17

When Coleridge himself is read critically, this mode of correction can appear symmetrical with that act of putting one's 'own definition on the other's words' he was so keen to oppose But, if practical criticism is the substance

of Coleridge's philosophy, as LA Richards thought, it certainly informs his interventions within the German philosophical framework In other words,

it is in his interest in and grasp of the problems of expressing and nicating various philosophical positions that Coleridge could make his own contribution This originality, now metacritical, did not appear in grand modifications of metaphysical schemes but in criticism of the language of those schemes, criticism that could vary from nit-picking and minutely suspi- cious commentary to a fairly worked-out rhetoric of 'tautegory' that was almost free-standing It is the key to understanding his use of Schelling He envied 'the many unstranslatable Words' available to the German philosopher and finally found one of his own 18 We can get a better idea of the philosophical oppor- tunities on offer to Coleridge by looking first at his (much less productive) quarrel with Fichte.

commu-In marginalia to perhaps Fichte's most accessible text, The Vocation of Man, Coleridge inveighs against Fichte for two main reasons As did Jacobi and Fichte's other opponents in the Atheismusstreit (the outcry over Fichte's

critiques of theology that cost him his Chair at Jena in 1799), he abhors Fichte's attribution to religion of an entirely moral foundation: 'Fichte says that Duty or the Law of Conscience is the Voice of God, for man the only Voice, the sole personality of God' 19 The religious sufficiency of the moral law repelled Coleridge like Schelling and Hegel, he found such an inner imperviousness to natural circumstance and emotion a further complication, not a solution to questions in either moral philosophy or the philosophy of

religion Agreeing with Schelling's objections to The Vocation of Man, he called

it 'the maddest bellow of Bull-frog Hyperstoicism, I ever met with under the name of Philosophy' The reference to Stoicism is quite precise If Coleridge (unusually) is read from a Hegelian perspective, as we will do a little later in this chapter, Stoicism is an important stage of self-surpassing in his own career.

On this view, Fichte's critique of all revelation leaves him stranded inside barren inwardness rather than enriched by a Stoical freedom from external oppression Stoicism, as Hegel argued, was inhuman in its imperviousness to what would reduce the rest of us to misery It was also irredeemably eccentric in its self-sufficiency, offering no general rules of behaviour, taking (or resisting) everything on its merits.

Coleridge also objected to Fichte's 'egoism' He sometimes phrased this second objection in an unfairly personal manner; at other times his disquiet is evidently based on a technical understanding of Fichte's idealism: 'a Juggler's trick of dividing his Individuality into the knowing and the acting Man!' 20

Both these two worries, religious and philosophical, converge in Coleridge's picture of 'This Man, who page after page can rant away in the perfect silence

of all human Consciousness! Grounding all on the equivoque of the word

T ! ' For Coleridge, a consciousness that remains mutely uncommunicative

can scarcely be human His 1809-10 periodical, The Friend, was a largely

philo-sophical venture based on this premise His re-creation of it in 1818 showsthe perennial quality of his communicative ambitions Fichte's solution to thepotential infinite regress in Kant's account of self-consciousness was, as wehave seen, to make the T absolute, encapsulating 'all human Consciousness'.Like Hegel, Coleridge would be put off by the lack of relation or consequence

in Fichte's absolute, by its 'silence' Coleridge was much more sympathetic toFichte's Kantian starting points It was from Kant that Fichte's moral version

of religion came Coleridge's fierce belief in immortality certainly shows him

in sympathy with Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, where the immortality of

the soul is a practical requirement for moral behaviour to appear to us to be

a rational course of action in the long run.21 Coleridge expressed or rathersurpassed this postulate with characteristic force in marginalia to Kant's'Dreams of a Spirit-Seer':

it is not any Hope of future Reward that impels me, nor any Fear of futurePunishment which keeps me in the Road - but the thought, that all, I can

do, is but a dream, and that not myself only but that all men & all thingsare but dreams, that nothing is permanent - which makes the mortality

of man a stupefying thought to me I cannot conceive a supreme moralIntelligence, unless I believe in my own immortality - for I must believe in

a whole system of apparent means to an end, which end had no existence

- my Conscience, my progressive faculties, &c But give up this, & Virtuewants all reason - Away with Stoic Hypocrisy! For if the Law be barren

of all consequences, what is it but words? To obey the Law for its own sake

is really a mere sophism, in any other sense -: you might as well put abracadabra in its place .**

More like Hegel, Coleridge has here turned the postulate - that the possibility

of our endless progress is required for the good life to continue to be a rationalend - against Kantian formalism, by filling out Kant's concession with moreaffect and existential force than either he or Fichte would have allowed

Schelling's philosophical moment

If Fichte's philosophy appears to eschew communication, Schelling's can

be read to some extent as being primarily a philosophy of communication.Coleridge's use of it to amplify his own metaphysical sensibility certainly worksthrough a notion of Logos or ultimate information-flow Schelling began as

an adherent of Fichte and then supplemented Fichtean idealism with his own

philosophy of nature or Naturphilosophie He then sought a unity behind this opposition, and his Freiheitschrift of 1807 through the unpublished Stuttgart seminars and WeUalter (Ages of the World) are backed by the philosophy of

Coleridges Philosophical Moment 19

identity, which they finally surpass, but which is most fully expounded in his

System des gesammten PhUosophie (System of the Total Philosophy ) of about

1804, also left unpublished at the time If the communicative emphasis iscorrect, this would fit with Schelling's intellectual environment in Jena from

the late 1790s through to the end of the System The Jena Fruhromantiker

- composing at various times the Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, Schleiermacher,Hegel, Caroline Schlegel, Dorothea Veit, and intermittently in touch withSchiller and Goethe - was much concerned with merging disciplines, seeking

out fruitful discursive collaborations, Sympoesie and Symphilosophie, or a new

mythology to be the adequate bearer of contemporary scientific discovery.Schelling's philosophy of identity explains how to think an absolute unityexisting behind all the differentiations and contrasts with which we makesense of the world Identity, Absolute, Being, Unity, God - these transcendentalterms are often interchangeable in this kind of philosophy, and the inter-changeability of the God-term both supports the theology Coleridge approvedand deprives it of its privilege In the Kantian tradition, the discriminationsfronting transcendentalism are understood reflectively; the classifications andexplanations with which we understand the world mirror our capabilities andrequirements for experiencing anything Schelling, though, presented theunconditioned requirement for experience as something ontological, as Being.Hence his more voluntarist formulations of an Absolute he believed we appre-hended in a more fundamental manner than that permitted by the logic ofreflection expounded by Kant and Fichte and, Schelling eventually believed, byHegel Already claiming to oppose Hegelian argument, Schelling insisted that

this primal identity did not cancel or transcend (aufheben) our world-making

activities As we shall see, it is arguable that Hegel meant the self-cancellation

or Aufhebung of finite things (the not not-I) to concede the different,

'specu-lative' kind of expression that Being demanded But Schelling's Absoluteremains a communicator requiring a more positive response In the 1804

System, we hear that 'the self-affirmation of the Absolute [Coleridge's 'infinite I

AM'] bestows on the particular in everything a doubled life'.23 Consistently,the 1810 Stuttgart Seminars ask us to understand our world as a repetition or

'doubling' (DoubUrung) of the Absolute in the particular lives around us, to be

clarified analogically, by a communicative initiative.24 The humanist analogyhere invoked to explain the 'doubling' of the Absolute in finite things is takenfrom our own experience Retrospectively, we recall our unconscious, unifiedexistence prior to our ability to reflect upon it So now we possess ourselvesonly in a doubled image Trapped forever on the reflective side we neverthelesscan imagine enjoying a freedom of reality anterior to reflection It is the same,

Schelling concludes somewhat spectacularly, 'with God' (So Gott) 25

Manfred Frank and Andrew Bowie have been patient expositors of Schelling'santi-Hegelian claim that our apprehension of Being is pre-reflective and soescapes Hegel's otherwise inexorable logic of mediation.26 Left open is thequestion of the best use of language to communicate this mode (unreflective,therefore immediate) of evoking the world so as to describe the scene of

our original, unselfconscious belonging It has decreed what we are But how do we revive its 'symphony and song? Lacan famously declared that the Unconscious had the structure of a language Julia Kristeva has probably been the most ingenious discoverer of locutions unsusceptible of reduction to reflective consciousness 27 Schelling and Coleridge did not have the benefit of Freud's science of tropes and were heirs to stricter rhetorical proprieties and discursive distinctions Arguably their resistance to these constraints was at least in the spirit of Freudian innovation Schelling's clearest statements of this linguistic challenge come after the extraordinary privileging of the aesthetic

at the climax of his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism as the 'organ' of

philosophy The aesthetic possessed the ability simultaneously to express the artist's conscious purpose and to encode another unconscious meaning still

to be uncovered in successive critical receptions, re-stagings, repetitions of the artwork But the aesthetic example does not seem to have sufficed; other relays were needed From within philosophical discourse, Schelling continues to reword this structure of repetition that also, I believe, shaped the core thought

of Coleridgean speculation The two key questions for Coleridge remain What happens to religion if philosophy can so adequately absorb its theological underpinning? This nervousness about religion's discursive autonomy perhaps loomed larger for him than fear of pantheism Also, which uses of language best serve to express our religious sense of belatedness? It would have to

be a rhetoric celebrating our grounding in a prior Absolute's free nation to set things in a human perspective And that, read in one direction, perhaps reversing Schelling's humanist analogy, can indeed sound inescapably religious God's is the model of our own problematic self-experience On the linguistic question, I will argue, Coleridge is eventually more inventive than Schelling who, in a notable instance, follows Coleridge's lead and is happy to concede that he has done so.

determi-In 1804, Schelling described the life not knowingly repeating God's as a

life of appearance (Scheinkben), one witnessing (as Frank puts it) negatively

to its grounding This allows Dieter Henrich's argument for more affinity between the development of Schelling and Hegel than either might have acknowledged 28 For 'appearance' suggests a form to be progressively seen through and relativized as we approach more adequate versions of absolute truth But we had thought that Schelling's identity philosophy had identified

as immediate an apprehension of the Absolute as we were permitted, one that may have been lacking an adequate language (which would have to forego its normal descriptive and expressive functions) but which we possessed now, not an apprehension still to be attained Henrich is helpful when considering

Coleridge's marginalia to Hegel's Logic Coleridge's annotations to Hegel were

very brief compared to others, but very relevant to our subject Coleridge

read the opening of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik and instantly criticized its opposition and then assimilation of Being (Seyn) to Nothingness (Nichts).

This choice of antithesis was Hegel's 'primary error' Being should have been

opposed to 'nichtseyrt, or 'non-being'.

Coleridge's Philosophical Moment 21

Read from inside Schelling's quarrel with Hegel (and it is almost impossible

to make sense of it in any other way), Coleridge's point is this: it is one thing

to distinguish between what exists and its competitors - between, say, lions and unicorns - and another thing to go behind all differentiation to some ultimate imponderable 29 He makes the same point when Hegel discredits a Being or Absolute that can be equated with unknowable 'tJimgs-in-themselves' You actually need another Absolute, which Coleridge calls God, in order retrospectively to construct the undifferentiated one Hegel thinks nonsensical

- 'the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black', as the 'Preface'

to his Phenomenology famously put it.30 As we have just seen, our particularized, divided world presupposes some ground of absolute identity which its distinc- tions can have in common - some ground for their comparison Schelling and Coleridge, though, think the same logic applies to the Absolute itself.

An unknowable Absolute is implied by the one we know in this way There is

a double movement at work here Coleridge appears to take up Schelling's

idea that: like us, So Gott God only becomes God by emerging, as our identity

does, from some still anterior unconscious ground to which God belongs ('God, whose is the Almight', writes Coleridge) as we do God does so by freely choosing to be the Absolute identity subtending this world rather than another This appears to be the gist of Coleridge's cryptic gloss.

No! [the thing-in-itself is] not the same as the absolute: but as its Idea in God In the mere Absolute (i.e the Almight) there is neither Division nor Distinction; but in God, whose is the Almight, there is each as well as all, perfect unity, but yet distinction / 31

Hegel rules out Schelling's elastic ontology Schelling, for his part, thinks that for Hegel to limit the meaning of the Absolute to the continuum

between different stages of knowledge explains how things work, but without ever engaging with equally legitimate questions arising from the fact that

there is anything there to work in the first place Dieter Henrich, though, commendably persistent in keeping Hegel within the post-Kantian picture, has argued in detail in his chapter 'Seven steps on the way from Schelling to Hegel' that Hegel's logic was actually capable of Schellingian versatility In fact, Hegel could have learned from Schelling precisely how to maintain simultane- ously two clauses saving his logic from Schellingian critique First, the Absolute was to be thought of as identical with the particulars we experienced around

us, but only insofar as they could suggest their ground of comparison This assumed that the ground was not the same as what it grounded In the words

of a Coleridge notebook entry, 'all Ideas are so far idea as being particular formally they are universal essentially' After this he correctly adds, 'S T C =

Schelling' (CN3 4428) Second, this rising above particular differences could

not, therefore, have been one of them, and so the Absolute could not find itself reflected in any individual difference The Absolute has to be thought

of as differing again, this time from the systematic differences defining things.

Hence the Absolute doubles both as the Spirit (Geist) in which those ulars inhere, and as their difference or otherness (Anderseits), the boundary

partic-of the Absolute's equally characteristic unconscious potential for subtendingworlds as yet unrealised In Henrich's clever reconciliation, the reflection inotherness required for Hegelian self-definition merges with the doubling orrepetition required for Schellingian self-definition.32

This careful finesse (common to Schelling and Hegel) was ignored byJacobi

in his polemic against Schelling's alleged Pantheism in Uber die GottUchen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung (On the Divine Things and their Revelation), much to

Schelling's fury.33 Schelling had sidestepped Pantheism by arguing a differentkind of acquaintance with Being from the mode by which we gained ourknowledge of the everyday world The ordinary world could be expressive ofGod, but God still belonged to a larger, undifferentiated, orbiting ground.Coleridge could describe this Tanentheism' clearly and economically when hewanted, as when he discusses the possible indebtedness of 'the leading Idea'

of Schelling's theology to Kant and Boehme: '(I allude to his "Untersuchunguber das Wesen der Menschclichen Freyheit") namely, the establishing anindependent Ground of God's Existence, which is indeed God (TO Geiov) butnot God himself (O Oeoq)'.34 Schelling insisted on an 'infinite lack' in Being,

an 'indivisible remainder', which modern commentary has seen as the lastinginterpretative challenge of Schelling's philosophy Attempts to get on termswith this defining deficit have lifted his work decisively out of the context of the

pantheism debate (Pantheismusstreit) to address issues of cultural materialism

and psychoanalysis.35 For Hegel, less attracted to Jena adventures in nicative logic, the second clause more prosaically placed the Absolute beyondany particular stage in its development Hegel, we saw, evolved the concept of'Spirit' to describe the doubled negative self-relation of Absolute identity (thenot 'not-I') thus disclosed The question then is whether Hegel's logic of thisnegative self-recognition by Being's otherness from the things that disclose it is

commu-a sufficient commu-account of our sense of it.36 For Coleridge the answer was no LikeSchelling, he had recourse to non-philosophical languages to characterizeour special orientation towards Being This feeling of the directedness orfittingness of Being to our experience had already been expressed aesthetically

by Kant and ethically by Fichte But further possibilities opened up cally for a philosopher like Schelling who had been receptive to the dialogicalferment of Jena

dramati-It is worth re-emphasizing that Schelling was from 1799 to 1803 surrounded

by the ironists and consummate wits of Jena, full of bold cross-disciplinarysolutions to questions of how best to express this complicated philosophicalsituation in which particularity is understood as properly grounded only insofar

as it is not itself The world repeats an Absolute Being contracted to humanlyappreciable proportions, an accommodation which, by definition, cannot begot at directly Since, therefore, the Absolute can only be expressed through thisdeceptive differentiation into particulars, both poles of ScheDing's philosophy,particular and Absolute, are beset by paradox Particulars, incapable of

Coleridge's Philosophical Moment 23

grounding themselves, then seek impossibly in their negative relation to others

- their dependency on their difference from others for their own identity - asatisfying reflection of their negative relation to reality And, in this doomedquest for closure, the particulars they differentiate themselves from are equallybeholden to still other things they are not Andrew Bowie has rightly seenhere anticipations of Derrida's grammatology of a language forever in pursuit

of a transcendental signifier that would lock all its parts in place.37 Schellinglikewise emphasizes the vanity of a striving towards our Absolute grounding.But clearly the linguistic challenges in expressing all these tensions are extraor-dinarily demanding Eventually, in his positive philosophy, Schelling looksfor an answerable style for the Absolute pole of his thought Coleridge bothmatches this concern for the validation of the Absolute through the variety

of difference, and suggests a rhetoric for a positive grasp of the identity thusindirectly intuited

The stylistic means (Stilmittet) Frank sees as appropriate to Schelling's

philo-sophical vision is 'irony' Wolfram Hogrebe enlarges on this general point toargue that Schelling's early interest in a new mythology as the proper object

of modern philosophy found collaborators in the Jena circle who encouragedhim to persist in ambitions that resulted in the aesthetic focus obvious from the

1800 System ofTranscendental Idealism to the 1804 Philosophy of Art™ In particular,

Schelling's reading of Dante among the circle of Jena intellectuals led him

to write about the Divina Commedia in a manner advancing his philosophical interest in aesthetics far beyond its source in Kant's Critique of Judgement In

his 1807 public lecture, 'On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature', whichColeridge translated almost verbatim for his 1818 lectures, Schelling rehearseshis philosophy of identity That is, he appears to use the old neo-Platonicargument that like can only be known by like If that were all there were to theaffinity between mind and nature, science could do as good a job as could bedone in expressing this identity But, as we have just seen, Schelling and Hegel,contra Jacobi, believe this identity is not created by what depends on it, and

that they have moved beyond the Pantheismusstreit Nor, Schelling particularly

emphasizes, is our awareness of identity dependent on our apprehension ofthings We need another angle of approach to the identity subtending differ-ences in order 'to lay hold of it alive' Sharing Hegel's terminology once more,

Schelling describes this unity as being of a geistiger Art, of a kind belonging to

'spirit'.39 This has been the essence of his break-out from the Fichtean

prison-house of consciousness into the new subject-matter of his NaturphUosophie Now,

Schelling begins to develop his ideas on this awareness beyond what he has said

about it so far in the context of his Identitdtssystem as well as his NaturphUosophie.

We cannot get at what makes for meaningful comparisons between scienceand nature through reflection, which already belongs to the consciously scien-tific side of the contrast Nature's unconscious affinities are soil modelled in

graspable form for us by art, apparently as they were earlier in the 1800 System.

Hogrebe, however, shows clearly that, from the beginning of his use ofthe example of art, Schelling's strategy has been deepening In Schelling's

1803 essay 'On Dante in relation to Philosophy' (Uber Dante in philosophischer Beziehung), which really is an essay on the Dante created by the Jena group, we

find perhaps the sharpest and most economical statement of this profounder

philosophical art or 'mythology' For Schelling, the Divine Comedy is 'the

paradigm of the contemplation of the universe'.40 To achieve this status, thepoem has had to overcome its historical character, and, using all the genres atits disposal, it has become independent of the kinds and disciplinary propri-eties of its time In doing this, it demonstrates itself to be 'the poem of all

poetry, the poetic art of modern poetic art itself (das Gedicht aUer Gedichte,

die Poesie der moderne Poesie selbst) In Schellingian parlance, it ups its Potenz;

in Hegelian terms, it becomes Geist 41 Poetic creativity of this kind bursts

its aesthetic boundaries, historicizing and rendering provisional (vorldufig) its starting point in order to become exemplary (vorbildlich) for a future,

modern age And that modern age must be prepared in its turn to forego thecomforting framework of accepted human achievement specific to its time inorder to recover a feel for the underlying universal identity In Schelling's essay'On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature', he asserts that 'only through theperfection of form can form be destroyed', presumably a reversible insight.42

We have already encountered this aporetic dialectic We saw Schellinguse the humanist analogy of our experience to figure how we structure theAbsolute Just as we can belong to a productive past we are unconscious of,

so God can figure his plenitude as a ground which was his but not him likeOrpheus denied Eurydice when he looked back, we can only specify thisundifferentiated Being by losing its characteristic lack of specificity And wenormally hold people responsible for the subjectivity or personality which thus

emerges Equally, to be anything, the Absolute needs to be specific, and so had

to split itself off from its larger origins Coleridge seems to manage this aporiaquite adroitly, as when he takes a Schellingian view of time contra Jacobi.According to me Time begins perpetually, it being the necessary manifes-tation and life of Eternity, which implies Time as its Consequence even asTime implies Eternity as its Ground

In the case of 'God', though, these continuities are more problematic TheDante example is important, and literary history more to the point than sheerchronology, when it figures a denial of its original nature in order to enjoy alife in time, the life of its successive critical receptions, and in order to have afuture.43 To read Dante in this deeper sense allows his poem to model how weshould think an Absolute which only exists dialectically: both as it is historicallymanifested, and as it exceeds these circumstances and is not the creature ofthem

Schelling's Dante-model breaks out of medieval Catholic theology into

a modern poetry whose own consummation is the destruction of its owndefinition as it seeks further incarnations whose supporting identity has beenintuited The trouble for Coleridge is that there appears to be no reason ever

Coleridge's Philosophical Moment 25

to halt this process, to 'Weave a circle round him thrice' and fix the poet's meaning in doctrinal certainty Universal progressive poetry, as Friedrich Schlegel would call it, knew no end of self-negation and of refutation of its individual historical expressions Coleridge's fear of Schellingian pantheism was less Jacobi's fear of the heresy and more a worry that commitment to Schelling's mythological philosophizing perpetually destabilizes the cultural establishment Coleridge needs to be in place for religion to occupy the pre-eminent place his faith demands Such abandonment was precisely its mythological character Consoling to Coleridge, though, was that throughout this continually destabilizing process a consistent symbolism of the unity underlying these discarded particulars remained We were not committed to

an eternally fruidess striving after an elusive transcendental signified While Schelling thought that Dante did not possess a 'symbolic mythology' which might have brought his insights to consciousness, Schelling and Coleridge will use tautegory to do just that 44 In fact, Coleridge will go further and envisage

an intellectual class specially attuned to the universal truths of symbolic gories, a class working to represent our universal interests in a re-imagined polity But then it is just such susceptibility to a universal symbolism that freed Dante's poem from its ostensible Christianity and accorded it such momentous philosophical significance The dialectic goes on.

taute-Hegel's speculative history

I want to prepare the way for a Hegelian portrait of Coleridge Commentators

on Schelling and Hegel, often the best ones, tend to illuminate one at the expense of the other Perhaps they are irredeemably opposed Coleridge, though, relates to both, although it is to Schelling, of course, that comparisons

are almost exclusively made Yet Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, published

in Jena in 1807, provided the most striking philosophical dramatization of the period in which Coleridge lived It was the most ambitious theory of his moment On the back of the Jena achievement, it narrated, simultaneously, a history of classic stages of philosophy and the story of the evolution of a contem- porary philosophical spirit In a book which situates Coleridge philosophically,

it is impossible to ignore If ignored, the Phenomenology remains the proverbial

elephant in the room Post-Kantian through and through, it developed a content for the self-consciousness behind Kant's theory of knowledge, obliged

by him to remain purely formal This apperception, or reflection upon the way in which one conceived of the world, was both historicized by Hegel and made the driver of historical change Self-consciousness was no longer either empirical or transcendental - either historical awareness or a purely logical requirement for knowledge to belong to someone and so be knowledge - but both Logical disputes therefore became imbued with all the historical desire, conflict, passion, terror and melancholy of conscious experience Although he

never read the Phenomenology, Coleridge's career fits into the Hegelian plot in

suggestive ways that picture him as a philosophical child of his time

Hegel was settling accounts with Schelling to some extent in his Phenomenology

of Spirit Both, along with Holderlin, had been fellow students at the Tubingen

Stift Schelling's success came first A phenomenal philosophical prodigy byhis early 20s, he provided a measure and then opposition against which theslower-developing Hegel defined his own thought Coleridge was finally muchmore Schellingian than Hegelian, but, like Schelling, he could have foundhis story told in Hegel's merging of contemporary individual aspiration withthe history of philosophy's exhaustion of conceptual possibility Hegel tells

his story twice in the Phenomenology, the first time emphasizing the individual

consciousness's striving for legitimation, the second time emphasizing theinescapably historical and individual character of successive incarnations ofthis apparently objective, universal authenticity In the first, the progress istypically from the particular to the general; in the second, from the universalcategory to the individual one Eventually, both histories merge in an AbsoluteSpirit where the individual can be incorporated without loss in the world, incommunity and institutional life In turn, these generalities themselves canreceive no more satisfying instantiation or membership than Hegel's much-travelled individual

Hegel makes the career of consciousness into the very process of sophical argument The Jena philosophers generically diversified philosophicaldiscourse, looking for theoretical alliances between philosophy and modes

philo-of thinking, speaking and writing that previously had been the subjects onwhich, magisterially, philosophy would pronounce Now philosophy usedpoetry, history, theology and the rest as stand-ins for theoretical tasks it couldnot accomplish on its own, or as temporarily and unproductively separateprojects in need of philosophical interpretation to each other Hegel, though,carries this broadening of the philosophical front even further and makes theexamined life, as it were, into an argument, into philosophy itself In this way

he retains the idea of a master discourse which the philosopher speaks Wewill look at Coleridge's life-writing later, and can here anticipate judging it to

be trying to have it both ways He holds fast to the idea of a life that gathersitself in its entirety into a philosophically authoritative voice, but he also courtsall sorts of discursive surrogates that suggest the immanence of theory inplaces traditionally thought ancillary to major philosophical effort - such asbiography This has been a problem when trying to understand Coleridge'sphilosophical consistency But taken within the arena of post-Kantian debate,rather than viewed from outside, his divergences make more sense Schellingwas the philosopher who came nearest to Coleridge's theoretical positioning.Existential where Hegel was rational, Schelling felt able to be as philosophi-cally inclusive as the Jena Romantics while claiming that a special philosophicalinsight licensed his acceptance of the diversity of the world and our differentforms of orientation within it As the repetition whereby an infinite, absoluteactivity took on definition, our primary experiences nevertheless became

Coleridge's Philosophical Moment 27

philosophically significant only as they made us think this difference, sible to grasp in any other terms And it therefore required an additional

impos-philosophical effort, as Coleridge insists in Biographia Literaria, to focus on

things in this way

Getting from the first part to the second part of Hegel's phenomenology,

so that he can run the same argument backwards from absolute to individualconsciousness - from ethics, culture, Spirit and ultimately Reason to theindividual dilemma - shows him to be at once more and less certain thanSchelling and Coleridge His absolutes, until he calls the whole process ofthe phenomenology absolute Reason, are repeatedly historicized, found

to be temporary stages on the way to some fuller knowledge But we can,thinks Hegel, possess this final certainty of the whole We don't have to linger(as Hegel famously thought Schelling did) in the sense of our indefinabledifference from it, thus indistinguishable from indifference, lost once more inthe night in which all cows are black So, on the road to absolute knowledge,Hegel busily demolishes, one after the other, the supra-individual bases withwhich he seemed keen to replace the certainties of self-consciousness whichhis phenomenology began by questioning In his critique of Kant, for example,

he argues that formal moral imperatives without presuppositions lack anycontent Kant thinks that you can detect whether or not an injunction is agenuinely binding duty simply by virtue of its logical structure, of the contra-diction, that is, involved in contravening it What we require of everyone else,

we are obliged to do ourselves, and that possible maximization assures us in

individual cases that we are on the right lines Sophocles' Antigone, Hegel

argues, shows two formally consistent positions in collision In choosing one,therefore, supporting either Antigone's or Creon's cause, decisive for us must

be not form but content Otherwise, to repeat Coleridge's criticism of Kantianformalism cited earlier, 'you might as well put abra cadabra in its place'.45

But then our decision becomes an historical one, between two institutionsand ethical backgrounds, that of Creon's State and that of Antigone's family.Antigone's domestic authority to demand the right to bury her murderousbrother is based on laws older than the polity Creon defended against him Butthis does not make Antigone right, for Hegel, but rather raises the question ofher place in the modern Greek State just as it shows that same State's modernitysurpassed by the historical pressure she puts on it If Antigone's demands lookanachronistic, Creon's State looks out of touch with an important constituencyand in need of refurbishment itself Such institutional oppositions are easilydescribed as * self-estrangement' of the social order or current version ofwhat universally applies to all Ethical disputes appear to be still those of anindividual writ large, and Hegel must move on in order to re-establish thepriority of an authoritative institutional basis

But this certainty of being able to leave the individual behind has alwaysseemed problematic to some The tyranny of a homogenizing Enlightenment

is claimed to lie behind Hegel's intolerance of political eccentricity To others,the implausibility of Hegel's ever being able to leave behind this process of

moving on from inadequate universals has on the contrary been the saving grace of his thought The transition from consciousness to Spirit has always been the crunch moment for Hegel's project In a sense the PhG can be thought of as having two parts, whose frontier lies here', writes Charles Taylor Equally sympathetically, but trenchantly, Robert Pippin identifies it as the moment when we encounter 'you can't get there from here' problems 46

Taylor, like Jean Wahl before him, takes up Rosenzweig's suggestion that Hegel's own stateless situation in Jena under Napoleonic hegemony rendered his position inescapably individual 47 In his time he was condemned to live

the self-estrangement of his society, and at the moment the Phenomenology

moved out of self-introspection to insist on harmony with historically existent institutions, the plan was bound to founder Others see here the liberation of Hegel from the closed speculation that a finished political identification would secure, and the true immanence of his characteristic philosophical activity in temporal process and change.

From Kojeve to Derrida, interpreters have shown the explosive power

of individual sections of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, arguing that these

expansive individual moments cannot be subordinated within Hegel's overall scheme They burst out from the 'restricted economy' Hegel tries to impose

on his own thought and establish alternative trajectories - revolutionary (Kojeve on the master/slave episode), theological (Jean Wahl on 'the unhappy consciousness'), grammatological (Derrida deconstructing any episode) But others query the assumption of a totalizing, closed Hegelian system these departures supposedly resist For Gillian Rose, Hegel's hallmark speculative propositions typically entertain the dialectical opposite of what they assert They sidestep 'the normal relation between subject and predicate' 48 Hegel's assertions are never cut and dried but 'acquire meaning as the result of a series of contradictory experiences' The whole force of Hegelian logic is phenomenological, revelatory of the mode in which our experience obliges us

to understand things Phenomenology implies the historical determinations currently invalidating our claims to the whole truth, but also sets out a practice (not a negative ideal) for recognizing what Rose calls our 'unfreedom', and for thinking through its restrictions towards an absolute understanding 49 In the

Difference essay, Hegel historicizes even this self-consciousness, his own epoch

of 'absolute subjectivity and absolute objectivity' 50 A reflective practice as critical as this can then be argued to escape the criticism, levelled from Marx

self-to Habermas, that Hegel simply absorbs any external criticism within his own dialectic 51 A speculative logic as suspicious of any presuppositions as Hegel's, its defenders maintain, is at risk of being extremely obscure but not of being self-serving.

It is worth, though, returning to Hegel's acknowledgement that his lative propositions are linguistically anomalous In matching the 'cunning'

specu-(die List) of speculative reason, they do not, he writes, observe normal subject/

predicate structures In order to lie open to the evolution of their content over time they must somehow invite a reading that does not attribute fixity to

Coleridge Is Philosophical Moment 29

what they assert; that catches their sense of having been determined to expressthings in this way The latter point is twofold Hegel implies that the terms he

is obliged to use are historically located; equally, though, this does not provokehim to otherwordly or ahistorical idealizations Especially in the 'Spirit' section

of the Phenomenology (where historical location precisely counters the

unworld-liness of extremes of introspective self-consciousness) and in the conclusions

of the Logic, he says that the fact that the real is not for us as rational as he

claims it is does not invalidate or idealize his claim: it diagnoses the currentparameters of our world as temporary boundaries not absolute limits It solicitsthe reader to read on

The kind of language Hegel first considers flexible and plastic enough withwhich to invite the proactive response he wants from his reader is aesthetic In

the Difference essay, earlier philosophies are not unsuccessful, obsolete versions

of later ones Both are as historically valid as each other Just as classical art isnot made up of 'preparatory studies' for a superior Renaissance art, so 'everyphilosophy is complete in itself Philosophies perform their task at differenttimes for different 'cultures' and gain an 'interesting individuality' in theprocess.52 What is this task? It is to 'construct the Absolute for consciousness';but since their historical restrictions make this unconditioned project self-contradictory, philosophies must employ expressions which remain valideven if they are self-contradictory 'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then,

I contradict myself I am large, I contain multitudes', sang Walt Whitman

of himself But, even in the heady days of the Jena Fruhromantiker when the Difference essay was published, it was not obvious that sheer poetic generosity

would suffice The belief that poetry alone is adequate to our experience of theAbsolute seems to belong to an aesthetic ideology stemming from only the first

part of Kant's third Critique Coleridge's use of different 'logoi' - philosophical,

religious, scientific, poetic, political - to expound his thought makes him lessexclusive than this; discursively, at least, he offers more points of entry, is moredemocratic

Hegel, for his part, wants to maintain that philosophy opposes current'absolutes' and then re-establishes new ones from the same source, its ownabyssal Reason It does so in speculative propositions which formally anticipatestill further historical contradictions to come Now Coleridge, with Schelling inhis debt for once, also, as we shall see, addresses the strain this task puts uponlanguage Coleridge's uses of'symbol' and 'tautegory' are intended to house thisabsolute sameness within historical difference which poetry might exoneratebut could not rationalize Hegel's mature philosophy explicitly leaves poetrybehind or places it as a stage in its own philosophical progress Hegel, though,does not spend time theorizing the speculative uses of language his thoughtdemands He would have remained unmoved by Coleridge's reiterated lamentthat 'it is among the miseries of the present age that it recognizes no mediumbetween Literal and Metaphorical'.53 Yet the defenders of Hegel's speculativepropositions, including himself, do appear in need of this refinement But,

as Michael Rosen points out, Hegel's undoubted investment in language as a