Coleridge and the crisis of reason

Part I Coleridge and Spinoza1 Silence and the Pantheistic Sublime in Coleridge’s Early Coleridge’s critique of Spinoza’s metaphysics 47Coleridge and Spinoza: A providential Part II Coler

Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason

Richard Berkeley

Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason

Richard Berkeley

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4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 17721834“Religion 5 Pantheism in literature 6 Pantheism I Title.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Wesen die Rede ist, das ich nur in und aus den rebus singularibus erkenne, zu deren nähern und tiefern Betrachtung niemand mehr aufmuntern kann als Spinoza selbst, obgleich vor seinem Blicke alle einzelne Dinge zu verschwinden scheinen.

– Goethe an Jacobi, 9 June 1785

Wie die Sonne am Firmament alle Himmelslichter auslöscht, so und noch viel mehr die unendliche Macht jede endliche.

– Schelling SW VII 339

For a very long time I could not reconcile personality with infinity; and my head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John.

– Coleridge BL I 201

Part I Coleridge and Spinoza

1 Silence and the Pantheistic Sublime in Coleridge’s Early

Coleridge’s critique of Spinoza’s metaphysics 47Coleridge and Spinoza: A providential

Part II Coleridge and the Pantheism Controversy

4 Understanding the Pantheism Controversy 59

vii

Mendelssohn and Morgenstunden 64

Schelling and the defence of pantheism 66

5 Reading under a Warp: Coleridge and Jacobi’s

Coleridge’s understanding of Jacobi’s rhetorical

Mendelssohn’s proof of God’s existence 97

7 Coleridge and Schelling: The Seductions of Ideal

Ungrund and Indifferenz: Schelling’s speculative

8 The Anxiety of Pantheism: Hidden Dimensions of

Coleridge’s Transcendental Deduction 145

Coleridge’s transcendental deduction 147

9 Coleridge’s Trinity: The Defence of Immanence 165

Coleridge and Schelling: Eternity, evil and evolutionary

10 Reason, Understanding and Truth 187

Reason and understanding: The rhetoric of

Thanks to the Commonwealth Fellowship and Scholarships Plan forfunding to undertake the doctoral research at the Australian NationalUniversity that led to this book

Thanks to The Coleridge Bulletin for permission to publish a revised

version of ‘Silence and the Pantheistic Sublime in Coleridge’s Early

Poetry’ as Chapter 1; European Romantic Review (see www.fandf.co.uk/

journals) for permission to publish a revised version of ‘The Providential

Wreck: Coleridge and Spinoza’s Metaphysics’ as Chapter 3; and Prism(s):

Essays in Romanticism for permission to publish a revised version of ‘The

Anxiety of Pantheism: Hidden Dimensions of Coleridge’s ental Deduction’ as Chapter 8

Transcend-Thanks to the British Library for permission to quote from Egerton2801; the Victoria College Library, University of Toronto, for permis-sion to quote from the ‘Opus Maximum’ MS; the Harris ManchesterCollege Library, Oxford, for permission to quote from Coleridge’s MS

annotations on Spinoza’s Benedicti de Spinoza opera quae supersunt omnia;

the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas atAustin and Priscilla Cassam for permission to quote from the Rugby MS.Thanks also to Graham Cullum and Udo Thiel for their skilful super-vision of my project; Paul Hamilton and James Engell for their judiciousevaluations of my work, and persistent encouragement and advice; FredBurwick for his inimitable encouragement; Alistair Fox for his hard-headed advice in the face of all difficulties; and many other friends andpeers without whose encouragement this book could not have existed.Thanks especially to my family for their support; to Jacob Ramsay,Karen Elsom and Melissa Kirby who contributed so much support andfriendship during my research at the ANU; also to Wes Morrison,Tabby Mannetter, Kathy Copeland, Alicia Kuppens, Tom Mazaitis, UshaWilbur, Art Bass, Simon Colyer and everyone at Mammoth for keeping

alive the ‘heart in the head’ as Coleridge says; to the Otago German

department for so many lessons; to Barry Empson for his help and advice

on my German Philosophy translations; to Clare Penno, Harley McCabe,Liz Newell, Tim Muller and all the clowns for bringing so much fun intothe last 2 years; and to Natalie Pierce for her friendship and good senseduring the pangs of manuscript revision

x

List of Abbreviations

AR Aids to Reflection (Collected Works)

BL Biographia Literaria (Collected Works)

C&S On the Constitution of Church and State (Collected

Works)

CL Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

CN The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Ethics Spinoza On the Improvement of the Understanding,

The Ethics, Correspondence

Schriften IV)

Friend The Friend (Collected Works)

Logic Logic (Collected Works)

MW Mendelssohn Gesammelte Schriften

ODI ‘On the Divine Ideas’ quoted from Coleridge Opus

Maximum (Collected Works) 214–90

OM ‘Opus Maximum’ MS Victoria College Library,

University of Toronto (VCL S MS 29)

LHP Lectures 1818–1819: On the History of Philosophy

(Collected Works)

SL Spinoza’s letters Spinoza On the Improvement of the

Understanding, The Ethics, Correspondence.

SW&F Shorter Works and Fragments (Collected Works)

SW Schelling Sämmtliche Werke

ULS Jacobi Über die Lehre des Spinoza

xi

Note on Quotations from MSS

The MSS ‘Opus Maximum’ (OM) and ‘On the Divine Ideas’ (ODI) have

been published together in the Bollingen series under the title Opus

Maximum This edition is quite aggressive in correcting the

punctu-ation, spelling and so forth I have therefore preferred to continuequoting directly from the MSS where possible I have not done so withODI however, because the Huntington’s permissions policy did not co-ordinate well with my publishing needs Quotations from ODI therefore

follow the Opus Maximum text For convenience, the MS pagination

numbers are followed in quoting from both OM and ODI, since these

are reproduced in the published Opus Maximum.

For clarity, my editorial interventions are marked by [ ] and <>,whereas interventions already existing in published version of MSmaterial are marked by { }

xii

The purpose of this book is to remedy the central weakness in Coleridgestudies: the persistent failure to grasp the full significance of thepantheism controversy for Coleridge’s poetry and thought Thomas

McFarland’s (1969) Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition—considered

authoritative for almost 40 years now—has indirectly contributed to thisproblem because it articulates a very specific and idiosyncratic under-standing of the issue, and its ‘authoritative’ status has denied it mean-ingful engagement in the literature The result is that some of the mostimportant and abiding aspects of Coleridge’s intellectual developmenthave been left drastically under-examined, as McFarland’s book madethe question seem exhausted This book overturns McFarland’s under-standing of key philosophical aspects of the pantheism controversy, andColeridge’s understanding of the controversy

Most fundamentally McFarland presents the pantheism controversy

as an ontological dispute: an argument between those who took the self

as the starting point for philosophical enquiry, and those who took theexternal world as the starting point But what was really at stake herewas the status of reason, and Spinozism was only the flash point in thedispute because Spinoza became an emblem for reason itself Moreover,McFarland presents the image of Spinozism as a settled one, whereas

in fact a large part of the pantheism controversy was fought preciselyover the interpretation of Spinozism, so that this was one of the mosthotly contested issues at hand The driving questions of this book thenare: what are the boundaries along which the image of Spinozism isbeing contested? and how does Coleridge understand this contestation?This is of central importance to Coleridge studies because Coleridge’sengagement with the controversy was much more central to his intel-lectual life than has been supposed Part of the difficulty here is that

1

Coleridge himself repeatedly minimized the appearance of dependency

on pantheistic patterns of thought, and minimized the extent to whichhis philosophical interests were entangled with the image of Spinozism

In the argument that follows I suggest that these attempts at ation should not be taken at face value, and indeed that they are oftenevidence of the very opposite The very influences that Coleridge wasmost troubled by—the ones he was most deeply concerned with—arethe very ones that he most insistently denies, and he denies them forthat very reason

minimiz-The result is a substantial reconsideration of Coleridge’s engagementwith German idealism in general To take the most obvious andimportant example, Coleridge’s reading of Schelling has traditionally

been seen in terms of his plagiarisms from System des transscendentalen

Idealismus, and understood as an adoption or appropriation of a

‘transcendental’ standpoint It has virtually escaped notice that in the

very same texts Coleridge was also drawing on Schelling’s Vom Ich and Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (both much more open in their pantheistic implications), and, crucially, on Jacobi’s Über die Lehre

des Spinoza The result is that I point out a series of textual

connec-tions that have never been noted, and I show that Coleridge’s standing of Schelling was mediated by his understanding of Jacobi andthe pantheism controversy This calls for a significant re-evaluation ofthe received image of the transcendentalist Coleridge, who is imagined

under-to have left his earlier monistic and materialist interests behind by the

time of Biographia.

A critique of McFarland’s Coleridge and the Pantheist

Tradition

Thomas McFarland’s book must be understood in its context It was

in many ways an attempt to make positive sense out of Coleridge’sphilosophical activity against a backdrop of accusation and condem-nation surrounding Coleridge’s infamous plagiarisms The book’s mostsuccessful strategy is to outflank the whole ugly business by focusingnot, as many others had, on the ‘influence’ of some one or other ofthe stars of German idealism, but to throw Coleridge’s specific engage-ments into relief against the broad intellectual background As a result

it was one of the first studies to contemplate Coleridge’s philosophicalengagements in a sophisticated and contextual way

Nevertheless, McFarland spends considerable efforts in defendingColeridge from the traditional charges of plagiarism, by arguing that

they are not material to a judgement of philosophical originality.1

Indeed, he relocates the axis of judgement of Coleridge away from

a consideration of his philosophical utterances, and onto a eration of what he portrays as Coleridge’s own personal struggle toreconcile two opposed tendencies in philosophy without doing injustice

consid-to either.2 McFarland, following Coleridge himself, calls these twotendencies the philosophy of the ‘It is’ and the philosophy of the

‘I am’ The difference, as McFarland sees it, is that the philosophy

of the ‘I am’ begins with the self as its starting point, whereas thephilosophy of the ‘It is’ begins from the existence of some externalthing, or the world in general.3 The distinction itself is derivedfrom Coleridge’s own rather speculative division of all thinkers intoAristotelians and Platonists, and indeed it is closely related to a series ofsuch articulations among German thinkers.4 The idea is even crucially

related to the argument of System des transscendentalen Idealismus

in general as a contest between these two, McFarland is forced tosurrender all other distinctions in a way that makes it impossible to dojustice to the complexity of the German philosophical context of thetime The relationships between each of the main philosophical posi-tions were extremely complex and multi-focal Thus Kant’s critique was

an attempt to answer Hume’s scepticism, and was also a critique ofthe rationalistic metaphysics of the Leibniz-Wolff school However, atthe same time the critique of reason does not amount to a rejection ofreason, so that Kant also distanced himself from Jacobi’s anti-rationalstance It is impossible to maintain a clear representation of all of thesetensions within the ambit of a binary distinction between two types ofphilosophy

The second problem is that in order to make his account work overall,McFarland finds it necessary to lump all ‘pantheist’ thinkers into the

‘It is’ camp, along with Spinoza However, many of these thinkersliterally took the self as the starting point (Schelling for example), sothat by the original distinction they really belong in the ‘I am’ camp.There have been attempts to criticize McFarland for his conception of

pantheism itself, but the point I am making is that he tries to makethe distinction between the two kinds of philosophy carry more weightthan it can really support.5 To put it simply, the dividing line for thisdistinction is less crisp than McFarland needs it to be to base an account

of the entire history of philosophy on the idea of a universal strugglebetween the two

The third problem is that the insistence on understanding thepositions of the participants in the pantheism controversy in terms ofthis fundamental distinction leads to very specific kinds of interpret-ations of these figures McFarland allows his understanding of thesefigures to be structured by this concept, and the results are oftenproblematic In particular, McFarland depicts Spinoza very much as areductive materialist, and seems to see him as a predecessor of themodern scientific worldview (he repeatedly complains of Spinoza’s

‘scientism’).6 This is not entirely unreasonable, but I think that it isinaccurate as an interpretation of Spinoza, and tends to miss some

of the mystical implications of his thought Moreover, it is preciselythese features which appealed to the Romantic generation, so thatMcFarland has overlooked an important and relevant aspect of Spinoza’sthought

The fourth and perhaps most striking problem is that by standing the pantheism controversy in ontological terms McFarlandhas completely ignored the central issue of the controversy: the status

under-of reason Thus much under-of the impact under-of the controversy on Coleridgedrops out of view, because the ontological tensions are viewed inisolation from their implications for human rationality Thus whenColeridge considers Spinoza’s metaphysics, McFarland assumes that hedoes so with a primary concern about the theological outcomes, whereasColeridge’s concern is less about Spinozism itself than about whether theproblems of Spinozism are effectively announcing the failure of humanrationality to deal with matters of religion

The crucial point overall is that the understanding of Spinoza was itself

a hotly contested matter This contestation is absolutely at the heart

of the pantheism controversy itself, and McFarland’s strategy of preting the controversy on the basis of a static conception of Spinozismderived from a static distinction between philosophical starting pointsleaves him structurally unable to understand and explore the dimen-sions of this contested image of Spinoza He therefore interprets Spinoza

inter-as an unambiguously reductivist and fatalistic thinker.7 This begs thequestion of the controversy itself, which was deeply concerned withthe question of whether Spinozism or pantheism really is inevitably

reductive and fatalistic or not Similarly, when it comes to Jacobi andthe dispute between Jacobi and Mendelssohn, McFarland’s focus on thedistinction between the philosophy of the ‘I am’ and that of the ‘It is’has a distorting effect This dispute was about the status of reason, but inline with his overall conception McFarland depicts it as a confrontationbetween the two kinds of philosophy, so that he locates Jacobi as theproponent of the ‘I am’.8In itself this is largely harmless, but it leads him

to miss some important dimensions of the dispute For example, at onepoint McFarland describes Jacobi as a ‘radical rationalist’, and suggeststhat he is closer to the religious scepticism of Diderot or Voltaire than

to the religious piety of the romantics.9 This is simply untrue Jacobiwas clearly opposing himself to the reason and rationalism, and doing

so for religious reasons, and indeed the first edition of Über die Lehre

des Spinoza is rife with pietistic sentiment It is true that he later tried

to minimize the appearance of irrationalism, and wound up expressinghimself in terms that seriously obfuscate his original intentions, but

to designate him as a rationalistic ‘I am’ philosopher is to seriouslymisread him Indeed, McFarland himself goes on to correct this view in

a later article, describing Jacobi as ‘one of the most tenacious, consistentand penetrating of all opponents of Enlightenment “raison” ’, whichsimply helps to show the interpretive shortfalls of the ‘It is’ and ‘I am’distinction.10

I differ from McFarland on the interpretation of Spinoza The keyproblem, though, is that McFarland’s interpretation of Spinoza as a

‘reductive materialist’ is itself a consequence of his problematic concept

of the history of philosophy, of the arbitrary division that McFarlanddepicts as running through philosophy in general (a view that closelyresembles Coleridge’s own) This basic problem equally besets his under-standing of the figures involved in the pantheism controversy, such asJacobi

The consequence is that my interpretive disagreement with McFarlandruns far deeper than merely a disagreement over Spinoza: it amounts to

a disagreement about what was at stake in the pantheism controversy.McFarland sees it as a clash between objectivist and subjectivist tend-encies, whereas I see it as being primarily a crisis over reason itself.Indeed, this virtually amounts to a disagreement about the meaning ofphilosophy: McFarland sees philosophy as a confrontation between twobasic ways of thinking, whereas I see it as the process of mediating thetensions between different understandings of the world In its simplestform, McFarland says that Coleridge was torn between two differentways of doing philosophy, of which Spinoza was the prime exemplum

of one I say that Coleridge was in a state of anxiety because he wasunable to resolve the tensions between multiple ways of understandingSpinoza.

Understanding understanding: An hermeneutic approach to

‘influence’

The disciples of the critical philosophy could represent the origin

of our representations in copperplates; but no one has yet attempted

it, and it would be utterly useless To an Esquimaux or New Zealanderour most popular philosophy would be wholly unintelligible Thesense, the inward organ, for it is not yet born in him So isthere many a one among us, yes, and some who think them-selves philosophers too, to whom the philosophic organ is entirelywanting (BL I 251)

This passage from Biographia is interesting and important for several

reasons The first of these lies in the relationship of the passage toGerman philosophy It is obvious enough that Coleridge is adoptingsome of the elitist elements that are typical of German idealism.Moreover, he is doing so in a way that is designed to help reinforcehis own image as a thinker whose work is valuable due to his peculiarabilities and insight Such an image was valuable to Coleridge not only

on a personal level, but also on a professional (or even financial) levelsince he was attempting to base a literary career on it

The real interest, though, for a modern reader at least, lies in thefact that this passage is plagiarized from Schelling.11 It goes withoutsaying that this can provide crude data for an examination of Schelling’s

‘influence’ on Coleridge, or of Coleridge’s use of ‘sources’—at leastinsofar as one can make sense of these notions But the plagiarismitself is more complicated than such an approach suggests Coleridgehas altered the text in plagiarizing it: he replaced the Tierra del Fuegan

in Schelling’s text with a New Zealander Such a minute alteration istypical of Coleridge’s practice of plagiarism, and I will deal with manyother examples The alteration, though small, has important implica-tions Schelling’s passage involves a crucial image of polarity: Eskimoscome from the very north of the world, whereas Tierra del Fuego is inthe southern tip of South America Coleridge as an Englishman isperhaps showing his background interests here, and yet maintaining theintegrity of the image by selecting New Zealand as the pole of southernignorance Interestingly, though, he has disrupted the image; Schelling’s

version created a second polarity between ice and fire: ‘Esquimo oderFeuerländer’—a nicety that is simply lost in Coleridge’s version.Ironically, this also has implications for my own interpretation ofColeridge It so happens that I am a New Zealander myself, so thislittle coincidence means that even as I am in the act of beginning aninterpretation of Coleridge, he is accusing me of not understanding him,

of not even being capable of understanding him How could I? I lackthe organ for it

More importantly, this serves to illustrate the ways that my ownhistorical situation is determining my understanding I am myself ascion of the British world which Coleridge was favouring by excludingmention of Tierra del Fuego If nothing else, this has the effect of makingthe motivation for Coleridge’s alteration a matter which is obvious to

me in a way that it might not be for a scholar from a completely differentculture Moreover, it means that this passage has a peculiar comic valuefor me that it simply does not have for anybody else

All of this serves, then, to highlight some important methodologicalissues This book is about interpretation: it is itself an interpretation, andits subject matter is (largely) Coleridge’s interpretation of other texts.The project is to understand Coleridge’s understanding of these texts.Moreover, many of these texts themselves involve interpretations offurther texts (particularly Spinoza) As such the nature of understandingand the role that the interpreter’s circumstances and interests play inthe act of interpretation is the primary methodological issue I employGadamer’s concept of understanding both as a means to clarify thestatus of the material that I am examining, and as a basis for developingthe practical and structuring techniques I employ

The traditional problem of hermeneutics is familiar enough: ininterpreting a text one must somehow overcome the gap between thecircumstances of the production of that text and the circumstances ofthe interpreter Moreover, this gap must be overcome repeatedly, sinceeach new understanding of a part of a text forces a re-evaluation ofthe whole text, which in turn forces a reconsideration of the meaning

of each of its parts Thus the hermeneutic gap is typically described interms of an ongoing circle of interpretation where the interpreter’s owninterpretive standpoint is constantly altered by continued attention tothe text The situation is the same with an entire corpus of texts, so that

a Coleridgean scholar must continually re-evaluate the meaning of eachtext in relation to all the others Similarly Coleridge’s own reading oftexts must be seen in the same light, since his reading of each text has

an effect on his subsequent reading.12

Early attempts to approach this problem tended to focus on the idea ofovercoming the hermeneutic gap directly by reconstructing the condi-tions under which a text was written, and eliminating the interpreter’sown prejudices in order to produce an objective interpretation.13 Thisidea of removing one’s prejudices by a mere act of will is little morethan fantasy Indeed, it is not even clear what success in doing sowould amount to, since the problem is not so much one of blatantanachronism as a problem concerning the conceptual structures throughwhich we understand the world Of course the emphasis on objectivitywas in part a result of enlightenment thought about prejudice, andthe attempt to reproduce the levels of objective certainty found in thehard sciences Part of Gadamer’s approach to the problem is to critiquethe enlightenment stance on prejudice (the ‘prejudice against preju-dice’ as he calls it), with a view to suggesting that it fails to distinguishbetween prejudice as bias or hastiness, and prejudice as ‘pre-conception’,which amounts to the necessary conceptual structuring that makesunderstanding possible.14

Heidegger’s examination of the ontology of the understanding in

Sein und Zeit leads him to the observation that such a removal of

the interpreter’s own circumstances is both impossible and fruitless

He concludes instead that the act of interpretation is an expression ofthe prior conceptions of the interpreter As a result he characteristicallyinsists on the positive evaluation of the hermeneutic circle:

But to see this circle as a vicious circle and to seek ways to avoid it; or even just to ‘feel’ the circle as an inevitable imperfection, is to misunderstand the understanding from top to bottom The crucial thing is not toavoid the circle, but to enter it in the right manner This circle ofunderstanding is not a sphere in which just any kind of cognition canoperate; instead it is the expression of the existential pre-structure of

Dasein itself The circle should not be reduced to a vicious circle or

something to be tolerated.15

Heidegger’s understanding of the hermeneutic circle is based on his

project of analysing the ontological structure of Dasein, so that his

emphasis is on the way this structure shows itself in the act of ation His conception of the hermeneutic circle is based on the positivenature of the contribution made by the interpreter’s circumstances andprior conceptions, and on the observation that the ways that these priorconceptions determine the interpretation are not arbitrary or random,but rather have a constructive logic of their own

interpret-This is the starting point for Gadamer’s hermeneutics, which isbuilt upon this positive evaluation of the hermeneutic circle, thoughremoved from Heidegger’s ontological concerns Gadamer’s interest is

in the nature of the understanding itself, and the implications of thenature of understanding for the humanities The most controversialpart of his account lies in the positive role he assigns to ‘prejudice’itself, as the condition for the possibility of understanding Thus,where Heidegger identifies the positive results of the circular process

of understanding, and its implications as an indication of the nature

of the interpreter, Gadamer makes a positive evaluation of the preter’s ‘prejudice-structure’ itself, as the source of the very possibility

it is no surprise that Gadamer frequently considers the case of tion, and uses the model of a game to describe the act of interpretation,since he sees interpretation as an interaction.17

transla-The point of all of this is to see that the meaning of a text is notlimited to the original intentions of its creator Rather it consists of acomplex and ongoing interaction between the text and its readers Thecase of ancient works of art is a crucial one here, since it is precisely thetemporal distance from which the object has come that creates much ofits contemporary meaning Thus the ‘meaning’ of a Grecian urn for ushas less to do with the thoughts of its creator than with the fact that wehave a prior judgement of it as ‘classical’, so that its temporal located-ness is itself a source of meaning.18 Moreover, previous interpretations

of the urn are a source of meaning, so that a part of the meaning of a

Grecian urn for us is derived from Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, from the

sheer fact that it is an object that Romantic poets considered to have aspecial kind of significance

This book is concerned specifically with the act of understandingitself, since its primary aim is to understand Coleridge’s understanding

of the texts of the pantheism controversy This means that Gadamer’sconcept of understanding has a more direct and practical relevance to

my actual procedure Obviously Coleridge’s interpretation of importanttexts is a matter of intrinsic interest, but by turning Gadamer’s conceptaround it is possible to suggest a way in which more can be gainedfrom the process Gadamer observes that prejudice is a condition of all

possible understanding, and therefore evaluates it as a positive part ofthe understanding This also means that in each act of understandingthe prejudices or interests of the interpreter are observable, throughthe constructive role that they play The result is that in examiningColeridge’s interpretation of other texts, or even his use of those texts

in plagiarizing them, it is possible to gain an unsuspected wealth ofinformation about his own prejudices or interests This can be seen in the

example I began with—the Feuerländer passage—where a slight alteration

that he made in plagiarizing from Schelling showed his Anglo-centricfocus, and the deliberate nature of his attempt to relocate a piece ofGerman thought within the English-speaking world Indeed, it evenyielded some information about my own prejudices, since it forced me toforeground my own historical situation, and the way that this situationhas interacted with Coleridge’s

Bloom’s account of the nature of interactions between poets in The

Anxiety of Influence is built on the idea that the relationship between

a poet and his or her predecessors is an antagonistic one, and thatthe poet is in a state of anxiety over the possibility of originality inrelation to a massive poetic tradition The idea has a particular utilitywhen it comes to uncovering the prejudices of an interpreter such asColeridge All of Coleridge’s energies during the later part of his lifewere directed towards the goal of philosophical originality As a result,his interpretations of his philosophical predecessors and contemporariesare marked by the most fundamental of all of Coleridge’s prejudices:his desire to be able to pursue creative philosophical production along-side them In other words, the kind of anxiety that Bloom describes ascharacteristic of poets in relation to their poetic predecessors also holds

of Coleridge in relation to his philosophical predecessors.19 The result

of this is that Coleridge’s frequent miss-readings of texts, exaggerateddisagreements with texts, and even more frequent exhibitions of anxietycan be used as landmarks in the business of uncovering his prejudices.Thus an awareness of the psychological complexity of Coleridge’s rela-tions with his predecessors forms an adjunct to the technique that I amdeveloping here

One final corollary of Gadamer’s basic concept that deservesconsideration is that it forces a reconsideration of Coleridge’sphilosophical activities themselves There has been a tradition of criti-cizing Coleridge for his failure to achieve a philosophical ‘system’ ofhis own to rival the great ‘systems’ of his German contemporaries.However, these systems are far from an unambiguous success, and it istempting to think that Coleridge’s failure to engage in the extremes of

German philosophical system-building is a virtue rather than a fault.The fundamental problem here is that being systematic is not, as manyColeridgean scholars seem to assume, a sign of quality System is not

an achievement System is itself a philosophical claim, so that arguingthat Coleridge had a ‘system’ is neither a defence of his originality,nor of his intellectual prowess, and nor is it particularly informativesince we can easily see that he was committed to the idea of system,whether or not he actually managed to stack enough ideas together

to claim one

Some commentators have criticized Coleridge’s philosophical output

on the grounds that it is vitiated by religious faith In other words,

he is criticized by commentators such as Wellek for his prejudice infavour of certain theological conclusions However, in the light ofGadamer’s concept of understanding, such a criticism loses most of itscogency because the existence of such a prejudice does not, on such

a view, presuppose a failure of judgement or—dare I say—objectivity.The process of trying to accommodate one’s religious prejudices to thephilosophical views of the time cannot be seen as un-philosophical

or anti-philosophical as Wellek assumes Wellek’s view rests upon atwentieth-century set of assumptions about the secularity of philosophy,and the validity of some specific distinction between the religious andthe secular—all of which is dubious in itself and drastically anachron-istic in application to the Romantic era Coleridge could with equaljustice accuse Wellek of being un-philosophical because Wellek fails

to develop an integral account of religion, which was clearly a crucialpart of the project of philosophy in Coleridge’s period The process ofmaking an accommodation of all kinds of beliefs (including religiousones) to one another is a peculiarly philosophical activity—it is virtuallythe definition of philosophy

By adopting a hermeneutic approach I am committed to arguing thatthere is a hermeneutic circle operating between Coleridge’s religiousconcepts and the texts of the pantheism controversy Thus I viewhis understandings of these texts as dynamic and ‘anxious’, and Ifocus on the tensions that arise between different possible under-standings of pantheism This is why I refer to ‘double vision’ whereasMcFarland refers to ‘ambivalence’ My metaphor carries the implica-tion of two ways of cognizing pantheism that are superimposed inintolerable tension, whereas McFarland’s noun creates a static image ofindecision or divided feelings about one way of cognizing pantheism.Thus I develop the project of understanding Coleridge’s interactionswith German philosophy as ‘understanding understanding’, whereas

McFarland’s book—for all its sophistication—is inevitably an ‘influence’study.

This point has a wider importance too, because I approach thepantheism controversy as a dispute about the status of reason, whereasMcFarland, as I have already pointed out, understands it in ontologicalterms Thus McFarland implies that Coleridge was presented with twoontological paths to follow, two ‘influences’ to choose from I amarguing instead that he was surveying all of the ontological possibilitieswith an ongoing concern about the status of reason and its ability todeal with matters of religious significance, so that his conflicted under-standing of these ontological possibilities is governed by the problem ofreason—by the problem of the self-understanding of the rational subject.Thus Coleridge presents us again and again throughout his poetry andprose with images of problematic selfhood, and problematic attempts

to understand the world

Part I

Coleridge and Spinoza

Silence and the Pantheistic Sublime

in Coleridge’s Early Poetry

All mankind, whoe common ene is not diverted by ytem,

will agree, that darknes, olitude, and ilence, naturally oppres

the mind by a tremendous andublime enation.1

Silence plays an intriguing role in eighteenth-century accounts of thesublime It is often present in lists of sublime objects, typically (as inBurke) associated with the other privations—darkness, solitude and so

on.2 In the course of the century there was a huge variety of ingly intricate speculations on the sublime, leaving behind their Long-inian origins in rhetoric and variously becoming subjectivized, moreclearly defined in distinction from beauty, and associated with experi-ences of the infinite.3 By the early 1800s someone like Richard PayneKnight could articulate a theory in which privations like silence anddarkness are specifically associated with the infinite because the infinite

increas-is itself a privation of limits or boundaries.4 It seems quite istic that Coleridge would pick out the word ‘silence’ from this back-ground, and recognize the philosophical and poetic resources latent

character-in it

Indeed, Coleridge’s poetry begins with silence I say that because

Effusion XXXV (later to become The Eolian Harp) begins with silence.

The poetry has not yet begun and the environment is described in waysthat emphasize quietness, of the familiar soon-to-be-interrupted kind.The word ‘silence’ does not occur for a few lines—until the interrup-tion begins in fact—but when it does it marks the beginning of thephilosophical and linguistic complexity of the poem:

The stilly murmur of the distant SeaTells us of Silence (PW II 1 316–28)

15

Some previous accounts of silence in the conversation poems havepointed to the interplay of sound and silence as markers of pres-ence and absence, and in particular as marking changes in the poetpersona’s relationship with nature.5However, the word ‘silence’ carries

a huge complexity in itself before any of these issues of contrast andtransformation even arise

After all, silence is not really an absence in any simple sense at all.Rather it is a marker for an absence; it is what is left that tells you thatthere is an absence But a marker is itself a presence, so that silenceparadoxically brings this absence into presence Of course, this cannotactually be done in any stable or complete sense, so that comprehendingsilence amounts to the incompletable process of grasping somethingindefinite, or infinite Silence is telling us something about the kinds ofrelationships with nature or God that Coleridge wants to mark out.Telling of silence is paradoxical too, just as the word ‘silence’ carries

a paradoxical meaning One obvious response is to say that the sea tells

us of silence by being audible at a distance, showing us the silence ofthe local environment by contradistinction.6This is fair enough, but itseems to miss the tensions that underlie the poem, and that are so oftenplayed out elsewhere Aside from anything else it misses the symbolicsignificance of the sea The sea tells us of silence because it knows aboutsilence, because the waves with their ‘stilly murmur’ are transient formsproduced by enigmatic forces working in the silence of the deep Wavesand their murmur peter out and flow back into themselves; waves aremade of the sea, so they are, metaphorically, made of silence The sound

of the sea tells us of silence because we think something like this when

And what if all of animated nature

Be but organic Harps diversly fram’d,

That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps,

Plastic and vast, one intellectual Breeze,

At once the Soul of each, and God of all? (PW II 1 316–28)This is rather striking since it is now the sound qualities of the poetrythat are telling us of silence—bringing the sense of the words ‘Sea’ and

‘Silence’ into play despite their absence It also provokes an implicitcomparison between the images of the sea and the harp, and despitethe obvious similarity and association between the two images there is

a crucial difference, because waves are part of the sea, and silence forthem is a returning to unity Neither the harps themselves, nor the tunesproduced by them are part of the intellectual breeze; for them silenceamounts to extinction

The struck-out passage in the Rugby manuscript shows Coleridgewrestling with this relationship in greater detail; he says that the harp’stunes

Creation’s great Harmonious Concert form

Thus God, the only universal Soul,

Organiz’d Body as the [Instruments?] Organic Harps,

And each one’s Tunes are that, which each calls I.—7

There is a great tangle of struck-out words and phrases here: ‘Organiz’dBody’ is replaced with ‘Mechaniz’d Matter’; what may be ‘Instruments’

is heavily struck out, and the line ended with ‘Harps’; ‘Organic’ isadded above ‘Instruments’ to give ‘Organic Harps’ and further strikeoutssmother the lines The entire passage is struck out and repeated afresh,but with less certainty: now God ‘would be’ the universal soul, theconcert is ‘vast’ rather than ‘Harmonious’, and there is a new tanglebetween ‘Matter Mechaniz’d’ and ‘Mechaniz’d Matter’.8 The grammar

of the line ruptures as ‘Mechaniz’d’ hovers between adjective and verb—God may not be doing the organizing or mechanizing any more, andthe causal connection to the harps hangs in the balance This connec-tion is crucial, and resurfaces in another draft where the breeze ‘sweepsthe Instruments, it erst had’s passage fram’d’ (PW II 1 324)

It is hard to make much clear sense out of this tangle, except to observethat the focus of the lines, and of their torturous revisions, seems to fall

on the relationship between the tunes and God; they are the terms thatare being rehashed, and there is now a ‘great Harmonious Concert’ inwhich the tunes participate.9It is an interesting attempt to double up

on the sense of belonging to the infinite by making the tunes belong to

both the breeze and the concert, but in the end the problem is still thesame: silence involves dropping out of existence.

The Eolian Harp has been connected to a wide range of specific

philosophical formulations; arguments have been made in favour ofSchelling, Böhme, Plotinus, Hartley, Priestley, Berkeley and Cudworth.10

And yet the poem itself does not try to articulate a specific pantheism,rather it allows for a wide range of pantheisms and similar patterns

of thought, and comprehends them through the governing question

‘what if?’ That is to say, ‘what are the consequences?’ This is not

an exploration of the details of a specific philosophical articulation,but of the consequences of certain general kinds of philosophicalmoves

If we look in the obvious places in Coleridge’s reading it is not difficult

to find plenty of material that shows how questions like this came to

be formulated Priestley himself sets the problem in Matter and Spirit for

example:

Nor, indeed, is making the Deity to be, as well as to do every thing,

in this sense, any thing like the opinion of Spinoza; because I suppose

a source of infinite power, and superior intelligence, from which allinferior beings are derived; that every inferior intelligent being has aconsciousness distinct from that of the Supreme Intelligence 11

In trying to deny the pantheistic or Spinozistic implications of his

account of Deity, Priestley has raised the precise problem of The Eolian

Harp; the problem of how finite individuals are related to the infinite.

Coleridge almost certainly read this, as he specifically focuses on thisissue in a 1796 letter:

How is it that Dr Priestley is not an atheist?—He asserts in three

different Places, that God not only does, but is, every thing.—But

if God be every Thing, every Thing is God Has not Dr Priestly

forgotten that Incomprehensibility is as necessary an attribute of the

First Cause, as Love, or Power, or Intelligence?—– (CL I 192–3)Coleridge was not convinced by Priestley’s attempt to stave off theconsequences of monistic thought, and remains uncertain It is thisuncertainty that the poem enacts Coleridge was not drawing on aparticular ‘source’, rather he was constructing a deliberately generalizingspeculation that dramatizes the metaphysical tensions working inhis mind.12

The pattern of Coleridge’s own later references to The Eolian Harp

helps to support this argument Most obviously of course he relates

The Eolian Harp to Hartley’s associationism in Biographia (BL I 117),

but in the Philosophical Lectures he associates the image with Berkeley

(LHP 557–8), and this has attracted some recent attention leading toarguments that the poem involves some combination of Berkeley andHartley.13 However, his use of the image is actually even more widelyscattered than this suggests: he discusses it in a marginal note on Kant,where he dismisses the conception of the mind as an Eolian harp (CMIII 247–8), and in a note on Platner discussing Kant (CM IV 124) Itappears again in marginal notes on Böhme (CM I 609) and Heinroth(CM II 1003), and in a Notebook entry on Steffens (CN V 6683) Simil-arly, he uses the related sea imagery in a marginal note on Jacobi, saying

‘He seems always to have the Image of an Ocean before him, surgingitself into forms The begetting, the creating, these are above him’ (CMIII 100) The harp image also turns up elsewhere, often performingthe function of testing or problematizing conceptions he is reading

or thinking about.14 The implications of the image are perhaps most

tellingly rehearsed in a marginal note on Sherlock’s A Vindication of the

Trinity:

The doctrine of the Trinity rests securely on the position—that

in Man omni actioni præit sua propria passio; Deus autem est actus

purissimus, sine ullâ potentialitate— As the Tune produced betweenthe Breeze & the Eolian Harp is not a self-subsistent, so neither

Memory or Understanding or even Love in Man: for he is a passive

as well as active Being But in God this is not so— (CM V 25–6)This is particularly interesting because it describes a much clearer andmore sophisticated pantheism than can be derived directly from thepoem, and once more it emphasizes the problematic status of the finiteindividual It also demonstrates the breadth of the image’s applicationfor Coleridge, as he uses it here as an explication of a Trinitarian account

of Deity

I want to suggest that what is most important in The Eolian Harp is the

connection that is made between the absolute, with the threat it poses

to the status of the finite, and the clash between reason and faith.15Thisconnection represents the starting point of a philosophical problematicthat governs much of Coleridge’s later thought and his attempts tonegotiate the relations between reason and faith in his dealings withidealism and pantheism

The poem ends with the ironic scene of his wife chiding him for beingled astray by his speculations and telling him to ‘walk humbly’ with hisGod This is an image of the conflict between reason and faith It is in thepantheism controversy itself that this conceptual connection is pushed

to its crisis, with Jacobi’s arguments that all consistent use of speculativereason results in fatalism and atheism, in the swallowing up of the indi-vidual in an absolute that leaves no room for faith Jacobi thereforeargues for the rejection of reason, and as part of this general strategy hedepicts Lessing as a thinker led astray (into Spinozism) by his rationalspeculation Jacobi presents himself as a contrast to Lessing’s Spinozism,

emphasizing the need for a salto mortale, a leap of faith, and ends the

book demanding humble faith and obedience to an incomprehensibleGod, just as Sara does:

This is the glory of the Lord, the face of God, to which a mortal eyemay not rise But by His goodness He descends to us, by His gracethe eternal is made present to mankind, and He speaks with him—towhom He gave breath from His own mouth—through the sensation

of his own life, his own blessedness—I fall silent, I sink down glowingwith thanks and rapture.—Shameful if I could ask for a better path

of knowledge and peace (ULS 250 [255–6])

This pietistic ‘shame’ and disavowal of thought in the face of asuper-rational Deity parallels the poem’s self-judgement: ‘For neverguiltless may I speak of Him, / Th’ INCOMPREHENSIBLE! save when with

awe / I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels.’16It seems natural tosuggest that the resemblance between the conversation between Saraand the poet and the infamous conversation between Jacobi and Lessing

is more than coincidence There is even a striking resemblance betweensome of the details of the two conversations:

When Lessing wanted to represent a personal Divinity to himself, hethought of it as the soul of the all; and the whole after the analogy

of an organic body This soul of the whole was, like all souls in all

possible systems, as soul, only an effect However, the organic whole itself cannot be thought of following the analogy of the organic parts

of this whole, since it cannot draw on anything, cannot take fromand give back to anything, that is outside itself (ULS 46–51 [76–9])Most startling though is Lessing’s description of God as ‘the soul ofthe all’ (‘die Seele des Alls’), which is reminiscent of Coleridge’s ‘Soul

of each and God of all’ Indeed, the phrase clearly caught Coleridge’sattention, because he made a fascinating marginal note on this passage

in Jacobi, claiming that this idea of ‘the soul of the all’ had been adopted

by Schelling (CM III 82)

Earlier in their discussions, Lessing and Jacobi had discussed Leibniz’scomparison of human free will to the needle of a compass that thinks itpoints to the north of its own volition Jacobi argued (and they agree)that this is essentially similar to Spinoza’s image of a stone that hasbeen thrown and believes it is continuing its motion by free will.17

Coleridge’s “Eolian Harp” image occupies the same intellectual space,and explores the same questions The harp is reminiscent of Leibniz’scompass: a mechanical toy driven into action by mysterious externalforces

Coleridge’s reading of Jacobi can be confirmed by April 1799, which

is about 3 years after the poem, but there is reason to think he mayhave known something about the pantheism controversy before this.18

A contextual study by Schrickx aimed at exploring the question turns up

a surprising wealth of references to Jacobi, Mendelssohn and Lessing inBritish reviews and periodical articles in the 1790s.19Coleridge also mademention of both Lavater and Böhme in the Gutch Memorandum Bookwhich helps to demonstrate his awareness of German thought (CN I

174, 287) This is confirmed by Coleridge’s letters in 1796 which includereferences to Kant and Schiller, a significant mention of Mendelssohn,and most importantly a description of Lessing as ‘the most formidableinfidel’ (CL I 197, 209, 279, 284) This last is especially interesting, sinceLessing’s reputation as an infidel was primarily the result of Jacobi’srevelation of his Spinozism, so it seems unlikely that Coleridge could beaware of this reputation without knowing something about the events.This amounts to a substantial case for Coleridge’s general knowledge ofthe controversy as early as 1795–6, when he was writing and revisingthe first versions of the poem

My point though is not that Jacobi was the specific source here, butthat some version of the story and the idea of the clash between reasonand faith had made its way to him, and that it contributed to the ways

in which he was reading his sources This is shown not in any particularkind of pantheism being selected in the poem, but in the identification

of pantheism as leading to a crisis of reason and faith The material

of the poem is certainly tied up with Hartley, Priestley and possiblyBerkeley, but the question that is being directed at this material is, Isuspect, derived from Jacobi

Much of the conceptual structuring behind The Eolian Harp is present throughout the poetry of the next few years In The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner for example, the themes of silence, faith, and the threatened or

suffering finite individual abound Even the ship itself seems to be yetanother wind-driven toy, with the presence and absence of the breezemarking major transformations in the mariner At the crisis point themariner is becalmed, adrift on an infinite supernatural ocean and exper-iencing all of the privations that finitude has to offer: solitude, darkness,silence and even evil

I add evil to the list because defining evil as a privation (or negation)

is a typical pantheistic move, explicitly made by Spinoza and manyothers.20 If God has to be everything as well as to do everything, then

He must actually be every evil thing too, so that the problem of evil has

an extra immediacy, and denying the reality of evil in some sense (as bycalling it a privation) seems the only answer Of course, evil has a specialrole to play in the poem because it is what defines the individual; theweight of consequence and moral force is what constitutes the mariner’shumanity, and his story The poem seems to me to suggest that this iswhat makes a finite human being in distinction from the deep it is castadrift on

These kinds of thematic connections make the addition of the ‘one

life’ passage to The Eolian Harp in 1817 all the more fascinating:

O! the one Life, within us and abroad,

Which meets all Motion, and becomes its soul,

A Light in Sound, a sound-like power in Light,

Rhythm in all Thought, and Joyance every where–

Methinks, it should have been impossible

Not to love all things in a World so fill’d,

Where the breeze warbles and the mute still Air

Is Music slumbering on its instrument

It is, of course, Coleridge’s own attempt to answer the ‘what if’ of thepoem.21 The precise circumstances of this answer are rather complex:not only had he subsequently developed on the themes provoked

by The Eolian Harp in a series of poems (Frost at Midnight, The Rime

of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and others), he had also struggled

in Biographia to articulate a transcendental theory that would give

him the creative imagination without leaving him trapped in the icyfatalism that Jacobi warned of The insertion shows the traces of hisanxiety over this, as the emphasis on ‘Life’, ‘Light’, ‘Joyance’ and ‘love’

is well placed to intercept the reader prior to the (now explosive)

‘what if’ of the poem—enforcing an understanding of that questionthat avoids its most dangerous (fatalistic) implications Most import-antly it enforces a specific understanding of silence: ‘the mute still Air’(the silence) is ‘Music slumbering on its instrument’—only slumbering,not lost

I have speculated here that Coleridge had encountered some version

of the story about Jacobi, Lessing and the pantheism controversy by

the time he was writing and revising Effusion XXXV Of course this

is not dependent on the idea that he had actually read specific texts.All it requires is that he knew something about the events, and hadperhaps encountered a few of their characteristic phrases and images.Regardless of whether or not you think I am right, the really importantconclusion that I draw from all of this remains Even if Coleridge did nothave Lessing in mind when he wrote the poem, he must have had thepoem in mind when he did read about the pantheism controversy Itseems inevitable that when he came to read about Lessing’s pantheism,Jacobi’s faith, and even Leibniz’s self-conscious compass, he must haveunderstood the matter in ways that were in part determined by theexperience of writing the early poetry This conceptual nexus of silence,faith and pantheism structures his understanding of those texts and inturn sets the problems that he spent the rest of his life grappling with.This is crucial when we come to analyse his later thought and theology,because it helps to show the motivating factors that drive his anxietyabout pantheism and the infinite

Spinoza has been, and still is, susceptible to radically opposed pretations Of course, this is true of most great literary and philosoph-ical figures, but with Spinoza the distance between opposed views isunusually dramatic, and is perhaps greater than with any other philo-sopher Indeed, it can only be seen as a paradox that Spinoza hasbeen described as both the ‘universally infamous’ atheist (Hume) and

inter-‘ein gotttrunkener Mensch’, a God-intoxicated man (Novalis).1 wise, Hegel sees Spinoza as the precursor to German idealism, andrefers easily to ‘Spinoza’s idealism’, and yet McFarland complains ofSpinoza’s ‘icy scientism’, and effectively accuses him of a straight-forwardly reductive materialism by claiming that Spinoza’s God is a

Like-res extensa, an extended thing.2 What is at stake in these divergentinterpretations is not the technical detail of what Spinoza wrote, butits wider theological implications, and the meaning of those implica-tions for those who wish to accommodate Spinoza to their own widerconcerns

In some ways, this situation is surprising since Spinoza’s exposition

in the Ethics is remarkable for its clarity and precision at a technical

level However, it is perhaps this technical crispness itself that is ible for the phenomenon Spinoza says very little about his goals andassumptions and, in spite of his obvious Cartesian background, he doesnot obviously ally himself with any particular tradition or stance As

respons-a result, it crespons-an be difficult for rerespons-aders to relrespons-ate the mrespons-aterirespons-al to theirown interests, and readers may find very little to challenge whatever

24

preconceptions they arrive with Coleridge himself comments on thediversity of interpretations of Spinoza:

I never yet knew (said an Englishman extensively acquainted with theLiterature and Literary Men of the North of Europe) a single person,

whom Spinoza had ever converted to his way of thinking; but I know half a dozen at least who have converted Spinoza to theirs! (SW&F

I 620)

The diversity of the interpretations of Spinoza is not exclusively due

to this though; there is also another feature of the Ethics that helps

to foster the interpretive tension, and this is the fact that the bookalmost seems like two distinct books On the one hand there is the longchain of propositions, which is presented without any reference to theiroverall significance, and on the other there are the notes and corollarieswhich contain his most radical formulations and relatively polemicarguments Deleuze even suggests a deliberate disjunction betweenthe two:

The Ethics is a book written twice simultaneously: once in the

continuous stream of definitions, propositions, demonstrations, andcorollaries, which develop the great speculative themes with all therigors of the mind; another time in the broken chain of scholia, adiscontinuous volcanic line, a second version underneath the first,expressing all the angers of the heart and setting forth the practicaltheses of denunciation and liberation.3

Deleuze also notes that this was a traditional procedure for obscuringthe most radical elements of a philosopher’s thought Indeed, it is acommon enough phenomenon; Rousseau and Descartes seem to employsimilar techniques, and the history of literature is full of such indirec-tion The problem is particularly acute and interesting for this analysis,since the understanding of Spinoza was so radically transformed by thepantheism controversy Bayle had set the tone for Spinoza’s early recep-tion by interpreting him as identifying God with the material world,and decrying him as an atheist.4 Bayle’s reading was widely acceptedand this led to a tradition of condemnation of Spinoza.5

Thus, when Jacobi made his revelation of Lessing’s Spinozism heassumed (as did Mendelssohn, his opponent in the dispute) that thiswould destroy Lessing’s reputation However, the controversy itself hadthe very opposite effect: instead of destroying Lessing’s reputation, it

made Spinoza’s Thus there was a whole generation of literati and sophers who saw Spinoza not as an atheist and a reductive materialist,but in somewhat mystical terms, and as someone who had asserted thedivine status of nature Rather than reducing God to nature, he was seen

philo-as raising nature to God.6

Spinoza begins Book I of the Ethics by defining several terms he intends

to use in his discussion of God The definitions are apparently in noparticular order, but three of them are of particular interest The firstdefines the ‘self-caused’ as that ‘of which the essence involves existence,

or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent’ (Ethics I

def I) The third defines substance as ‘that which is in itself, and isconceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception

can be formed independently of any other conception’ (Ethics I def III).

And finally the sixth defines God as ‘a being absolutely infinite—that

is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses

eternal and infinite essentiality’ (Ethics I def VI).

The first part of the Ethics is directed at establishing that these three

things are the same Spinoza does this by beginning with substance, andarguing that it has the properties that he has defined as belonging tothat which is self-caused and to that which is God In propositions I–VIISpinoza attempts to demonstrate that substance is self-caused (propos-ition VII claims that ‘Existence belongs to the nature of substance’).Following from this in proposition VIII he argues that substance is

‘necessarily infinite’ (which was the definition of God), and havingestablished this he proceeds in following propositions to elucidate some

of the characteristics of ‘God, or substance’ This elucidation of God’snature deals with the other concepts introduced in the definitions:Spinoza tries to demonstrate that God is eternal and free (definitions VIIand VIII), that God is unique (there is only one substance) and that Godstands in a certain relation with the attributes and modes (definitions

IV and V)

This preliminary sketch of Spinoza’s opening arguments gives a onably clear picture of what Spinoza is aiming at Spinoza’s purpose

reas-is ontological: he reas-is attempting to come to some conclusions aboutwhat kinds of things exist, and what their basic ontological structure

is.7Moreover, he begins with the assumption that substance exists, andattempts to deduce the characteristics which must follow from this merefact Among these conclusions is the claim that substance is God This

procedure underlies the overall project of the Ethics: Spinoza tries to

establish what exists in Book I, in what manner we exist in Book II(which deals with the human mind), and finally to reach some conclu-sions about how we should act, based on an understanding of what

we are In short, the primary goal of Books I and II of the Ethics is an

analysis of the ontology of the human being

The crucial and problematic part of all this is the status Spinoza gives

to finite beings; the role he gives to the modes and attributes, and theirrelationship to God The definition of the attributes is the locus of afair amount of interpretive disagreement Spinoza defines the attrib-utes as ‘that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence

of substance’ (Ethics I def IV) The attributes are thought and

exten-sion, so that the crucial point is that instead of supposing these to

be completely distinct substances (as Descartes did), Spinoza is arguingthat they are merely ‘perceptions’ of substance Moreover, in elucid-

ating the qualities of God towards the end of Book I of the Ethics,

Spinoza says ‘God, or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, ofwhich each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists’

(Ethics I XI) In other words, there are an infinite number of attributes,

although he acknowledges that only two are accessible to the humanintellect.8

There is a history of suggesting that Spinoza really meant there wereonly two attributes.9 However, such arguments contradict Spinoza’sexplicit statements, and cannot really be taken literally.10 Of course it

is also possible to argue that the infinite number of unknown attributesplay no real role in Spinoza’s thought and are merely included in order

to flesh out the infinity of his concept of God Coleridge seems to have

considered this, as he says in a marginal note on the Ethics:

Spinoza’s great defect is that by commencing with two attributesexclusively, tho’ he admits infinite, (in the sense of innumerable,which I once without reason doubted) he gives no explication ofLife, or the Phænomena of Life, as Pleasure, Pain &c—and doubtlessnothing can be more arbitrary than to make the Will a mode of