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Content A PHENOM ENOLOGICAL VIEW OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL
PHILOSOPHY OF SAM UEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
IN THE BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA PA R T I
AND IN THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
by
S igm ar John Schw arz
A D is se r ta tio n P r e se n te d to the
FA C U LT Y OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In P a r tia l F u lfillm e n t of the
R eq u irem en ts fo r the D eg ree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(E n glish )
January 1976
UMI Number: DP23052
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This dissertation, written by
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D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. THE TAILORING OF AN ASSOCIATION............. 1
Phenomenology as Method and Style
Coleridge and Phenomenological Concern
II. COLERIDGE AND EPISTEMOLOGY: BIOGRAPHIA
I-IV............................................ 54
III. CONTENT AND CONTEXT OF COLERIDGE'S THEORY OF
IMAGINATION: BIOGRAPHIA V-IX, XII AND XIII . 90
IV. INTENTIONALITY AND THE BIOGRAPHIA: BIOGRAPHIA
X-XIII...................... 131
V. COLERIDGE'S THEORY OF IMAGINATION IN THE RIME
OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.................... 171
BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................... 198
ii
The person who is responsive to the stimuli
of art behaves toward the reality of dream
much the way the philosopher behaves toward
the reality of existence: he observes exactly
and enjoys his observations, for it is by
these images that he interprets life, by
these processes that he rehearses it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Birth of Tragedy
iii
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
— W. B. Yeats
CHAPTER I
THE TAILORING OF AN ASSOCIATION
Phenomenology as Method and Style
Phenomenology is important to the study of litera
ture in two quite different ways. First, phenomenology is a
critical method which tries to describe the structure of
man's consciousness by being as distrustful of man's physi
cal sense apparatus as of his emotions and prejudices, i.e.,
his psychology. The method, theoretically at least, is
presuppositionless, suggesting a neutral instrument that
could be used by a philosopher or critic of any persuasion.
Second, phenomenology is a matter of style, of what Maurice
Natanson has called "the style of phenomenological concern"^
which ultimately establishes the priority of meaning and
values over a sole concern with analysis and categorization
in the life of the intellect. Rather than an extensive
analysis of a complex philosophical movement the aim of this
first chapter will be to define phenomenological method and
style as central to the idea of literary criticism. Second-
1 _______________
2
ly, I suggest that Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Biographia
Literaria anticipates fundamental phenomenological insights
which ultimately serve to support his stature as of intel
lectual prescience. The value of investigating this associ
ation will be to show that the vision of Coleridge is
neither opaque nor self-indulgent nor simply aesthetic, -
rather, Coleridge as troubled spokesman for the English
romantics, struggles to maintain the reality and preciseness
of vision which is at the limits of language and metaphys
ics. By intuiting the dynamics of phenomenological method
and style Coleridge finds that the vision, which can be
expressed symbolically, survives psychologically only inso
far as we develop a means of rigorous self-consciousness
over our intuition.
Phenomenology centers on the philosophy of Edmund
Husserl and is basically a critique of what he calls the
"natural attitude," a naive sort of pragmatism that insists
on common sense and on belief in an external, existent
world which persists in space and time and which is much
2
the same for all men. Husserl recognized that common sense
is all too often based on a series of assumptions that take
at face value not only what we perceive but how it is that
3
we perceive. Not surprisingly, his first book dealt with
3
the subject ground that underlies all of mathematics. His
contention was that mathematics is superbly useful, but that
it is, nevertheless, an imposed system of order and logic
derived from implicit faith in what seems to be so according
to reason and the senses. That by mathematics men have
accomplished a great deal is a tribute to man's necessary
capability for ordering chaos, but this is not to say that
mathematics itself or logical thought in general, yields an
accurate picture of the universe and man1s relationship to
it. Whenever man too eagerly orders what he thinks he
perceives, his vision of reality will be distorted. Hus
serl attempted to formulate a purer logic, a less subjective
scientific method which would guarantee "the freedom of a
starting point which refuses to remain within the metaphys-
4
ical orientation of common sense." Husserl's initial aim
was to show that all consciousness is intentional or, as
Colin Wilson paraphrases the idea, "Husserl has shown that
man’s prejudices go a great deal deeper than his intellect
5
or his emotions. Consciousness itself is prejudiced."
The phenomenological method involves a number of
steps, the first of which Husserl calls epoche. It is the
act of placing all assumptions into hypothetical suspension
in order to prepare for a purified field of consciousness
2
in which presentation, not interpretation, becomes the cen
tral object of concern. Wilson makes the point that con
sciousness by Husserl's definition "reads" the world of our
perceptions as we would read a newspaper, i.e., though the
fact of the newspaper remains, what each individual reads
6
and how he reads it are quite different. By the process
of epoche we would concentrate on the newspaper as fact, on
how it presents itself to us devoid of our interpretations
by either selective or prejudiced reading. Wilson calls
this process "bracketing," and in successive stages one can
bracket out one's belief in the object or feeling under con
sideration. Theoretically one could then see the newspaper
as pure structure or pure color. This series of reductions
is the second stage of the phenomenological method. In
Husserl's terminology there are two main kinds of reduction.
The first of these is eidetic in which we are concerned with
the essential residuum which is left after we ignore or
bracket out that which is secondary, obvious, and contin
gent. The universal shows itself by default because it is
that which remains after everything possible has been
bracketed out. The next stage of eidetic reduction makes
explicit the intentionality of consciousness. Having
stripped down the object or feeling under consideration to
. 5
its essential residuum, we must try to define that essence
by a careful investigation of our responses to the object or
feeling as we successively bracketed it down. It is a re
flexive procedure which no longer concentrates on the object
or feeling but which makes our acts of interpretation,
seeing, hearing, etc. the object of objective inspection.
It is a way of trying to chart our own subjectivity scien
tifically.
This process results in what Husserl calls trans
cendental reduction which is the final stage of the phenom
enological method. As eidetic reduction seeks to isolate
from our perceptions the residuum of an object or feeling,
so transcendental reduction attempts to move from dealing
with subjective perceptions to isolating that in the self
which is the residuum after the individual perceptions have
been bracketed out. In Husserl's words, this is to seek
the "pure intentional life wherein my psychically real
7
experiences have occurred . . ." Husserl's concern in
all of‘ this,‘is to describe a theory of mind. He finds that
all conscious acts are intentional, i.e., they are direc-
tional; they are consciousness of something. Husserl
divides these conscious acts into subject (that which does
the acting or noesis) and object (the thing or feeling which
is acted upon or noema). He contends that both the subject
and object components of man's conscious acts are based on
the various a priori assumptions of individual minds. Con
scious acts are here psychological in origin and one task
of phenomenology is to isolate the pure form, the residuum,
upon which all assumptions are based.
A second, perhaps more important task, is to den
ser ibe conscious acts in Marvin Faber’s terms as "experi-
g
ences of meaning." Natanson points out that, "In this
sense, 'act1 no more implies an 'actor' (a subject contend
ing with an object) than consciousness implies a 'conscious-
9
ness-er. Conscious acts may be isolated (bracketed out)
from their subjective origin and may be seen as structures
of the mind that transcend individual consciousness. In a
transcendental sense, consciousness and meaning become
interrelated realities that exist as part of the given
structure of the mind. Meaning and intentionality as well
as consciousness are part of what the mind is, "Transcen
dental" in this context is not intended to sound mystical
and nonobjective: rather it is a way of defining that which
goes beyond individual subjectivity much as Jung's racial
memory moves outside of and beyond individual recollection.
For Husserl that which goes beyond individual subjectivity
7
is that which presents itself "originarily" to conscious
ness. It is the empirical fact, the residuum, that remains
after we bracket out our sense and logic responses to each
feeling or object we apprehend and after we isolate the fact
that we apprehend from all the different things that we do
apprehend. This rudimentary objective quality behind all
experience is what Husserl calls essence. It is always
unrealized, yet always given and obvious. Husserl says:
From our phenomenological standpoint we can and must
put the question of essence: What is the perceived as
such? What essential phases does it harbour in it
self in its capacity as moema? We win the reply to
our question as we wait, in pure surrender, on what
is essentially given. We can then describe that
which appears as such faithfully and in the light of
perfect self-evidence.-*-0
For a long time Husserl held that what he called
essence needed no source and he therefore did away with the
ego.^ The "I" was at best a product of reflection, not
given in experience. In Ideas, however, Husserl radically
changed his position. He posited a transcendental ego which
is the source of all intentional acts. What developed was
a type of idealism arrived at by epoche and the various
steps of transcendental reduction. Husserl says:
Consciousness in itself has a being of its own which
in its absolute uniqueness of nature remains unaf
fected by the phenomenological disconnection. It
therefore remains over as a "phenomenological
8
residuum" and as a region of being which is in prin
ciple unique, and can become in fact the field of a
new science-— the science of phenomenology.^
Natanson paraphrases well when he states:
The transcendental ego is, for Husserl, conscious
ness as such in its ultimate generality, revealed
as the very condition for the possibility of indi
vidual, empirical egos and ultimately their world.
Thus there are not transcendental egos, but the
Transcendental Ego, which is the phenomenological
ground and source for the individuated consciousnesses
within empirical reality.
Largely because of Husserl's own gradually arrived at ideal
ism there is in current phenomenological studies something
of a dualism and a desire to differentiate between phenom
enological method and phenomenological style. The method
which Husserl calls a new science attempts to be totally
empirical and objective. Ultimately Husserl found, without
intending to do so, that the method engendered both optimism
14
and idealism. This is Colin Wilson's point of departure
when he reacts against the various traditional existential
isms and promotes what he chooses to call "the new existen
tialism" in which he intuits nausea and affirmation equally.
The existentialism of Sartre, for example, Wilson says, is
a mistake of perception because it imposes nausea much as a
dogmatic priesthood might impose a kind of affirmation. It
is necessary and vital to accept the empirical situation
that man perceives not only by biological immediacy but also
g
by structural categories of meaning (part of the descriptive
genesis of the mind itself). To perceive by various forms
of imposition is to be a passive vehicle of random associa
tions; to deny (by repression and fear) that the mind has
more active centers of perception is to induce, by choice or
neglect, a myopic human condition that prevents evolutionary
progression. Wilson suggests this fundamental motivation
for the phenomenologist when he says:
Phenomenology has demonstrated that most of the
assumptions upon which we live (i.e., our impositions
of meaning and non meaning) and have our psychologi
cal being are false. But the question of how far
life itself is a success or a defeat depends upon
these assumptions. Is it not likely that one pas
sive fallacy of perception is as influential in
determining the degree to which we experience our
freedom as a conviction of inevitable defeat would
be to an army marching into battle? Our "spiritu
al" lives (I use the word for want of a better) are
certainly experienced as a continual conflict between
the passive fallacy and sudden knowledge of our in
alienable freedom. But for practical, everyday pur
poses the passive fallacy is inescapable simply
because our perceptions have to be limited for prac
tical purposes. Aldous Huxley pointed out that if
we all lived in a state of mescalin-awareness, there
would be no wars, but there would be no civilization
either; the blinkers that keep us from vision are,
to some extent, psychologically necessary. If the
passive fallacy could be totally undermined by some
phenomenological discipline, the results for human
evolution would be unpredictable, but certainly im
mense. Our human condition (as we grasp it according
to the natural standpoint) is 'determined by the way
we act and live, and consequently becomes known to
ourselves. But our actions are determined by our
assumptions about their possibility of success.
And our assumptions about their possibility of
-----------------------------------— ----“TO
success are determined by our idea of the human
condition (as we grasp it according to the natural
standpoint). It can be seen that this is a vicious
circle, that has been interrupted only spasmodically
by minor manifestations of freedom (in the form of
works of art, scientific ideas, philosophies).
Phenomenological analysis suggests a sudden radical
break in the cycle. It can now, perhaps, be seen
why I say that the results are unpredictable.^
Wilson's interest in phenomenology, then, is mostly an
affirmation of its style. He generally avoids the austerity
of the method itself, seeking rather to find a means for
sustaining expanded perception; and yet this method is sig
nificant to literature and to criticism in its own right.
When Allen Tate commented on the "fenced-in
apriorism of the merely philosophical approach," and said
that, "Its conclusions are impressive and usually stated at
great length," but that he had "never seen one of them that
increased my understanding of the twenty-sixth Canto of the
16
Paradiso, or even of 'Locksley Hall," he was unhappily
speaking out of an almost traditional hostility between
hilosophy and literature; yet it is a truism that a critical
theory that prides itself on keeping philosophy external to
its practice and formulation is as absurd as a philosophy
that would ignore the empirical fact of written and read
literature. The point, for the phenomenologist, of course,
is that even the "purest" critic is already a philosopher,
13
i.e., he deals with assumptions about the nature of reality
and experience, which in this case he refuses to acknowledge
or perhaps even to recognize. Structure cannot exist inde
pendently of relationship to an ontology and for Husserl in
particular the fallacy lies not in the fact of assumptions
but in the refusal to structure them into a tenable meta
physic in which context the work of literature can then be
most objectively evaluated. Even a critic such as Northrop
Frye, who has posited a structure or pattern, and thus
acknowledges a "Weltanschauung" fails to address himself
adequately to the genesis of that pattern whether within the
biology of the mind or within the cosmic ether external to
nan. The result has been a great deal of categorical
ledonism, a lot of structures, patterns, and symbols. Frye,
for example, creates a virtual superstructure, in both
senses of the term, of myth which carefully accounts for all
of literature, but nowhere is there any indication that myth
as a structural principle can move beyond the limits of
description or that literature as myth may move beyond the
Limitations of even collectively-perceived reality. The
argument of the structural critic is that patterns don't
mean; they exist to signify parallels, cohesion, or process,
and they are derived rather than imposed. But the problem
r 12
is that literature, though it contains parallels, cohesion,
and process, is more than the sum of its parts. Structural
symmetry can, of course, be an end in itself, but even this
recourse to pure aesthetics suggests in phenomenological
terms that behind the structure, behind the form, there are
moments of experience which mean something essential. For
the phenomenologist to hide behind derivation and descrip
tion is a kind of mental fraud. Criticism, which in sophis
ticated and knowledgeable ways mostly exposes literature as
various types of order and points of view, refuses to come
to terms with why most of us respond respectfully to what we
have come to call "good" literature in even the most general
sense, and it sounds suspiciously like the common sense (the
natural attitude) which Husserl ridicules because it brings
us to order at the expense of vision.
As in a theory of mind, so in a theory of litera
ture; the phenomenological method demands that initially we
recognize our logical assumptions and then, by processes of
reduction, begin to isolate and bracket out the essence(s)
of the work under consideration. All this sounds faintly
ludicrous until we realize that language itself is inhibit
ing the expression of the method. Husserl says that
essences, though given empirically, remain perpetually
T3
unrealized; unrealized, however, not only materially but
linguistically. When we have gone through the process of
bracketing but and have "seen" essence, we are all at once
incapable of verbalizing, in other than purely descriptive
and metaphorical terms, and soon we become content with the
patterns and structures and categories that describe but do
not name what we have witnessed. Not surprisingly, then,
there is in phenomenological studies an insatiable concern
17
with the structure and evolution of language. Maurice
Natanson infers this preoccupation when he finds that the
essence common to all literature is the "revelation of
3.8
language itself." In phenomenological terms, the language
of effective fiction teaches us how to see what is given us
in experience. When we recognize this "given" there occurs
a "momentous and instantaneous manifestation of reality,"
or an epiphany which finds the "world as it actually pre
sents itself elusive," and which "commends itself in making
substantive to consciousness what otherwise remains torment-
19
ingly adjectivial." The phenomenological method is
austere because it is based on absolute objectivity, and yet
it results in the unrealizable and the inexpressible, both
hallmarks of subjectivity. The problem arises from trying
to express something believed to be objective (the essence
: n
or residuum) by scientifically charting a very subjective
process— that of consciousness. Some contemporary psycholo
gists have found the phenomenologist1s theory of mind most
useful because as scientists interested in the preservation
and evolution of the species they can make positive medical
20
use of what is charted by the phenomenological method.
Literary critics, however, can make no further use of the
"tormentingly adjectivial"; we are already too wrapped up in
the disguises of description. The immediate task for a
critic in sympathy with phenomenological method "would be a
clarification of the essential terms, concepts, and mean
ings involved in aesthetic experience through a tracing back
of their epistemic genesis in the activity of conscious-
21
ness." Theoretically, in order to be true to its prom
ises, this method would have to result in the creation of a
new, common, and primary vocabulary that could actively
express the reality that exists at the intersection of
intentionality and meaning in the human mind.
Obviously, in practice, the complete formulation of
phenomenological method remains something of a myth, but
still more useful than most because it refuses to give any
one pattern or structure exclusive domain. The apparent
stalemate of the theory of phenomenological method would
15
justify Mr. Tate's boredom were it not for the shift in
emphasis that the method presupposes,. This s hi.ft in empha-
sis is what has been referred to previously as the phenom
enological style. Natanson makes a useful distinction when
he correlates the method of phenomenology with formulating
a philosophy of literature and the style of phenomenology
22
with finding philosophy in literature. The former are
ponderous and useful in a limited fashion when they operate
in the interests of clarity and discovery. The latter, and
more important, considerations are attitudes of inquiry that
derive strength from phenomenological method and yet are
independent of its "logic" as well as of the logic of any
other methodology.
Morris Weitz represents the sort of critic who
embraces a phenomenological style without becoming over
whelmed by the austerity of going along with every step of
the phenomenological method. In Hamlet and the Philosophy
of Literary Criticism, Weitz speaks from a phenomenological
orientation when he finds that the different schools of
criticism are driven into intellectual corners because they
insist on establishing a logical-mathematical system of
order. Though this is useful to some extent, it does little
to reveal the meaning of a work of art. Weitz says;
IB
I agree with the critics and philosophers that the
traditional questions about the objectivity, meaning,
justification, and function of critical utterance are
important in the philosophy of criticism. But I
cannot accept the persistent logical motivation of
traditional philosophy of criticism that a defini
tive and univocal answer is forthcoming to the ques
tion, What is criticism? . . .if we examine what
critics do in their essays of criticism instead of
what they say they do in their philosophical moments
or what philosophers sometimes say critics do or
must do, we will uncover answers to what criticism
is that are radically different from the traditional
ones in the philosophy of criticism.^
The difference that Weitz finds between what critics do and
what they say they do stems precisely from what the phenom-
enologist identifies as the inability of language to deal
adequately with meaning. Rather than at least attempting to
approach literature by the method of phenomenological reduc
tion, i.e., bracketing out assumptions and trying to verbal
ize the essence of a work, most critics settle for dealing
with that which Husserl would call secondary and contingent.
Critics say that they reveal the nature of a work of art by
their particular method, but what they do instead is to de
fine and promote the nature of a particular pattern of logic
and order. Even the so-called new critics whose expressed
aim it is to avoid the fallacy of imposing external ideas
and patterns on a work of art fail to acknowledge that the
logic of internal evidence contains inherently its own
a priori assumptions. Weitz has written his entire study
-j-y
of Hamlet by using a method of reduction. The first half of
the book is devoted to an exhaustive study of the assump
tions upon which the historical criticism of Hamlet depends.
By stripping away series after series of critical struc
tures, Weitz isolates what he feels to be the "given"
elements to which all of the critics show a primary and
similar response. In phenomenological terms, Weitz has used
epoche and eiditic reduction to arrive at the fictive real
ity in the work. In the second half of the book, Weitz
attempts to identify just what it is he has isolated but
finds himself talking instead about,
. . . the net result of what I have been able to
establish is the logical multiplicity of criticism
and consequently the falsity of the assumption per
vasive in criticism that all its discourse is true
or false statement.
As Husserl indicated the problem of phenomenology is reflex
ive in character, i.e., the method turns in upon itself when
it finds that what it has exposed is "irrealizable" lin
guistically. The method is useful, however, in exposing
assumptions that cover up or change the meaning we can
intuit, if not express, and this is precisely what Weitz
has done. By refusing to impose structures of his own and
by elucidating those of others, Weitz has phenomenologically
returned Hamlet criticism to what is "given" and to a point
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- r s
where future critics can concentrate on verbalizing the
"irrealizable."
One aispect of phenomenological style, then, is
reflected in Weitz's ability to use the phenomenological
method to maintain an intelligent objectivity that deliber
ately ignores the method's essential reversal into an inex
pressible and, therefore, rather useless idealism. Another,
perhaps more daring aspect of the style, however, is Natan-
son's and Wilson's interest in identifying the transcendent
al part of the method more accurately and in utilizing it
more fully. Natanson's thesis is that the fictive and
poetic "microcosm given us in a literary work is founded on
and in turn illuminates the transcendental structure of
25
common sense experience." Natanson posits that both fic
tive and actual reality are horizontal in character. By
this he means that our conception of reality branches out
from what we know by experience, to what we acquire and are
taught, to what we cannot even imagine. In this sense, "it
is not the world which gives itself to me, but its hori-
zon(s)." The simple fact is that we have come to take our
worldly horizons for granted while the phenomenologist
implores us to attain a highly self-conscious awareness of
Dur horizons. The elaborate rationales of logic and science
iy
have given us a sophisticated, but highly derivative order
of reality which "however subtle refuses to consider phenom
ena as given, as integral presentations of consciousness
27
which have sovereign status." The experience of litera
ture provides an opportunity to escape from such an imposed
consciousness because in the act of reading we become
self-consciously aware of the given horizons that affect
the events, characters, and ideas in the fictive reality.
A.s we acknowledge the genuine, naked a prior is upon which
fictive existence is based, in a subtle act of transposi
tion, we also turn in awe to the ordinary, given aspects of
our existence. Natanson says:
If sciences gives us a "clean" reality, the world
we begin with is fringed with torment . . . the
horizontal features of certain constants are sedi-
mented in immediate experience. This means that
being born into the world and dying in it are thes-;
matic to our lives in a completely a priori sense.
We cannot be taught what birth or death mean because
any teaching presupposes that we already know. At
best our experience occasions this learning.2®
For Natanson, the primary task of both literature and phil
osophy calls for the reconstruction of mundane existence so
that we "can teach ourselves to be able to say what we know
29
but cannot utter." A good work of fiction will "take us
by surprise, our shrewdness down, our arguments asleep, our
30
orthodoxies suspended," and we will identify what we have
zu
taken for granted and transcend what we have known. In a
moment of epiphany we will have encountered essence and
direct our efforts to its expression and sustained recol
lection.
Coleridge and Phenomenological Concern
What is obvious at first glance is that phenomenol
ogy incorporates an internal contradiction of both magnifi
cent and pretentious proportions. The phenomenologist
insists on a presuppositionless method yet he finds inspira
tion in the essence of things, and like Husserl, insists
categorically that "the science of pure possibilities must
everywhere precede the science of real facts and give if
32
(italics mine) the guidance of its concrete logic." The
preceding passage from Husserl's preface to the English
edition of Ideas will be examined more closely in context in
Chapter II. It is significant here though that Husserl
intends to begin his investigation of thought with this
blatant opposition between so-called objectivity and subjec
tivity. This grand synthesis of unity in opposition is not
a conclusion for Husserl; rather it is the prologue to an
emphasis on method which approaches the sterile machinations
of the logical positivists and a devotion to philosophical
2i
angst/ 'that . rivals the "fear and trembling" of Kierkegaard.
But when all is said and done [claims Husserl], this
work of mine can help no one who has already fixed
his philosophy and his philosophical method, who has
thus never learnt to know the despair of one who has
the misfortune to be in love with philosophy, and
who at the very outset of his studies, placed amid
the chaos of philosophies, with his choice to make,
realizes that he has really no choice at all."
Too often literary criticism of Coleridge and the
romantics concludes with this familiar reconciliation of
34
opposites. The stirring criticism comes from writers such
as Richard Haven and M. H. Abrams who, in the spirit of
Husserl and the phenomenologists, refuse to be reconciled
by opposites, parallels, or any of the other structures that
35
will solidify the method and osify the angst. To initiate
metaphysics with such a sense of the irreconcilable juxta
posed to a belief in reconciliation is actually to transform
it into the possible apprehension of vision by means of
objectified, if not objective, method. Husserl wants to
recognize and define the mental and emotional gymnastics of
ST
such transformations. More simply, he wants to know the
processes of the genesis and functioning of vision without
sacrificing the intuition of vision or the vision itself.
Throughout the many strands of the Biographia, Coleridge
seeks valiantly to preserve a similar triangle of intensity,
a "Dynamic Philosophy," which depends on the interaction of
_ T2
three states of being: the vision itself independent of man
and his consciousness (a subject that Coleridge takes up
best in his poetry), how the vision translates into the
self-consciousness of man, and finally just what it is that
the aware man sees once the translation has been effected.
Coleridge, well aware of the non-poetic temper surrounding
him, knew what was coming:
If it be said that this is idealism, let it be remem
bered that it is only so far idealism as it is at the
same time, and on that very account, the truest and
most binding realism. For wherein does the realism
of mankind properly consist? In the assertion that
there exists a something without them, what, or how,
or where they know not, which occasions the object
of their perception? Oh no I This is neither connat
ural or universal. It is what a few have taught and
learnt in the schools, and which the many repeat
without asking themselves concerning their own mean
ing. The realism common to all mankind is far elder
and lies infinitely deeper than this hypothetical
explanation of the origin of our perceptions, an ex
planation skimmed from the mere surface of mechanical
philosophy. . . . If to destroy the reality of all
that we actually behold be idealism, what can be more
egregiously so than the system of modern metaphysics
which banishes us to a land of shadows, surrounds us
with apparitions and distinguishes truth from illu
sion only by the majority of those who dream the same
dream?
This "elder realism" is the ursprung of vision; it
is the "essence" of the phenomenologist who moves into pre
history, into Jung's "racial memory," and into the poet's
intuition to proclaim that there ijs something out there to
know, that man's consciousness is not the criterion
2j
of being; rather, man's consciousness must be trained to
apprehend the essences of being for the first time. The
above passage, as so much of the Biographia, places Coler
idge outside of traditional philosophy and plants him
38
squarely in the middle of occult and esoteric tradition.
A.s we shall note in some observations that follow, tradi
tional phenomenology dies a similar, if more sophisticated,
death as do eighteenth-century materialism and idealism.
But none of these philosophical separations loses intensity
for Coleridge until he has in effect appropriated their
essence. In that sense, the English romantics (Blake and
Coleridge in particular) foreshadow Husserl's concern for
method as well as vision. For Coleridge materialism (empir
icism) ignores the intuition of otherness which is a common
empirical fact; on the other hand, Kantian idealism unites
pure and practical reason with the deftness of a sledge
hammer. The external world exists by definition not by felt
intuition and association. The result is that the Ding an
Sich lies useless, unapproachable and indefinable by defini
tion. Kant's synthesis, instead of allowing for a dialogue
between "I and Thou," succeeds only in making the "thou"
present but irrelevant. In Kant's world one still exists in
the realm of practical reason. Husserl correctly recognizes
. . T4
the mechanical nature of such transcendentalism and insists
that the authentic idealist exists equally in the worlds of
39
both pure and practical reason. In that case, the Ding
an Sich is approachable, definable, and far from useless.
In fact, one functions empirically only insofar as one
demands that which goes beyond the senses. In theory the
phenomenological method would isolate and make useful the
common essence of pure and practical reason.
Coleridge, writing almost one hundred years earlier
than Husserl, precisely anticipates this fundamental dis
satisfaction with German idealism. He writes in Chapter 12
of the Biographia;
Now the sum of all that is merely objective we will
henceforth call nature, confining the term to its
passive and material sense, as comprising of the
phaenomena by which its existence is made known to
us. On the other hand, the sum of all that is sub
jective we may comprehend in the name of the self or
intelligence. Both conceptions are in necessary an
tithesis. Intelligence is conceived of as exclusive
ly representative, nature as exclusively represented;
the one as conscious, the other as without conscious
ness. Now in all acts of positive knowledge there
is required a reciprocal concurrence of both, namely
of the conscious being and of that which is in itself
unconscious. Our problem is to explain this concur
rence, its possibility and necessity. (Italics mine.)^®
Husserl accepted the concurrence of Coleridge's nature (pure
reason) and intelligence (practical reason) but he came to
feel that human methodology could isolate only a limited
25
number of possibilities in perception.41 Man could, for
example, say with certainty that a circle is never square;
he could not say that a circle has more meaning than a
square. Almost in spite of itself, phenomenological method
circumscribed the range of its explorations. Husserl lived
equally in the worlds of pure and practical reason but he
had (i.e., man had) a limited number of ideas. Coleridge,
the philosopher, realized the strength of such methodology;
after all, not to limit the number and kinds of ideas is to
move perilously close to a completely subjective universe,
to repeat Kant's error which was to exist only within prac
tical reason while paying academic lip service to pure rea
son. But Coleridge, the philosopher and visionary, knew
also that "an idea in the highest sense of that word, cannot
be conveyed but by a symbol; and, except in geometry, all
A 9
symbols of necessity involve an apparent contradiction.
The contradiction is that the concrete, defined symbol has
a seemingly limitless range of associations; i.e., the ideas
within the symbol have equations of both geometry and value.
The poet and the visionary, provided they are sufficiently
certain of their intuition, are able to say that a circle
means more than a square and also that a circle can some
times be a square much as Lewis Carroll can say of Alice,
---------- 2^5
"Either the hole was very deep or she fell very slowly."43
As will be seen in a later chapter, the dynamics of the
Biographia rest not so much on the interplay between mater
ialism and idealism but on the psychic tension that enables
the poet to distinguish reliable from nonreliable intuition.
"The demonstrations and constructions of the Dynamic Philos-
44
ophy scientifically arranged" were to be presented in the
never-written Logosophia. This matter of arranging neces
sary mental and emotional opposites scientifically is pre
cisely what Husserl attempted in Ideas with the result that
the range of vision is necessarily confined to "the" method.
Coleridge is often chided for not writing his dissertations,
for not fully systematizing his thought; yet one hundred
years after his death the phenomenologists had demonstrated
that such method building, even with the purest of inten
tions, invariably sacrificed a portion of the Ding an Sich
it was designed to save. It is entirely possible that
Coleridge, the poet and visionary, knew the price of rigor-
cus as well as sloppy metaphysics and that, therefore, he
chose a mental biography as the form which allowed the most
natural and extended interplay among intuitions. The
methodology in the Biographia is devoted to separating
essential from psychological intuitions: the former comprise
. 27
the stuff of vision; the latter are distortions of percep
tion which must be overcome. In the Biographia Coleridge
searches for the range of emotions that corresponds to
essential intuitions.
The Biographia, then, is most fundamentally an ex
plicit investigation of consciousness in which intuitive
vision is perpetrually in search of more objective method.
As Richard Haven has pointed out, this, in one sense, is
45
neither a particularly astonishing nor new supposition.
In the initial stages of investigation it is simply a more
structured way of saying that Coleridge could not reject
anything, that at times his eclecticism ruled his thought
rather indiscriminately, and that at other times he earnest
ly tried to construct a viable ontology out of his wide-
46
ranging observations and associations. In another more
characteristic and profitable sense, however, Coleridge's
investigation of consciousness intuits Husserl's phenomeno
logical method, a method which is important because it
provides the language by which Coleridge's ideas may find
their most wide-ranging expression. When Coleridge wrote,
there simply were no philosophical parallels to his thought.
Twentieth century existential and phenomenological terminol
ogy serves to explicate more precisely many of Coleridge's
___________ 23
seemingly opaque distinctions. The central irony, of
course, is that this new precise language also tends to
limit the categories of vision: a dilution of which Coler-
W
idge was only too aware in his persistent laments about the
47
limitations of language. In applying phenomenological
categories to Coleridge's thought it is, therefore, essen
tial to show how he insists on moving outside of even the
most "accurate" of languages: that is, Coleridge is continu
ally anticipating the critical method of phenomenology while
at the same time never relinquishing that style of phenome
nological concern which seeks to refine the intuition and
appropriate the vision. Coleridge's purposeful reconcilia
tion of opposites shows:
1. That the method and the metaphysics of the
Biographia (like phenomenology) mirror a philo
sophical split that can be seen most acutely in
the historical opposition between materialism/
empiricism on the one hand and idealism/ration-
alism on the other (Plato vs. Descartes vs.
Sartre, for example).
2. That Coleridge (again like the phenomenologist)
disposes of the split by confronting the dilemma
of intentionality (whether based on empiricist
29
or idealist assumptions) with a radical method
of reduction that presumes to make intentional
thought either needlessly circumscribed or com
pletely irrelevant.
3. That like existentialism (which phenomenology
precedes historically but seems to follow exper-
ientially) the phenomenologist seeks to extend
man's consciousness by penetrating into the
boundaries of metalanguage, that is, there is a
spectrum of awareness between what can be spoken
or written and the experience of what that lan
guage represents. The spectrum of awareness is
the human visionary capacity and the phenomenol
ogist tries to evoke and then to maintain this
position of balance between what must be said
(that for which a concrete language must be
found) and what cannot be spoken (that which
must be experienced as the language beyond lan
guage) .
4. That Coleridge intuits this progressed version
of the Cartesian split and that in the Bio
graphia (explicitly) and in the "Ancient Mari
ner" (implicitly, poetically) he attempts to
30
express— literally— the complete, frustrated
efforts of human beings to experience truth and
beauty and love (i.e., vision) in words. To the
significant extent that he succeeded, Coleridge
has emerged as a rare and gentle phenomenologist
of thoughts and emotions (reason and feeling)
and of their link to the transcendent within
man.
It is possible, then, that Coleridge makes vision
more accessible by incorporating aspects of phenomenological
method. Unlike the methodological phenomenologist, however,
Coleridge does not equate all forms of intentionality.
Vision, after all, begins with what Coleridge called an
48
"intuition . . . a practical idea." Nor, like the exis
tentialist, does Coleridge equate all forms of subjectivity.
Rather, he says, "I seem to be seeking, as it were asking, a
4 9
symbolic language for something within me." At crucial
moments Coleridge shifts from a rigorous indicative mood
that describes to an equally undeniable imperative mood that
demands. His philosophical distinctions seem consistently
designed to confirm the necessary coexistence of these two
moods. Phenomenologically this is in itself a strength
because the phenomenologist begins by accepting the complete
(
31
range of human experience. Thus both "indicative" and
"imperative" experiences are said to exist. The difficulty
is that the method of phenomenological reduction tends to
reduce the imperative or visionary experience out of exist
ence. It is ironic that a methodology which attempts to
objectify essence by eliminating or at least accounting for
the intentionality of our perceptions sifts out not only the
errors of seeing but also limits and refuses the possibility
of what objective essence(s) might be. Bound to a method
which seeks to describe the totality of experience, the
phenomenologist who deals with theory alone too often
ascribes totality only to the method itself. The method
does not consistently allow for the ebb and flow of never
quite accepting anything and never quite giving anything up;
it does not allow for the passion of rearranging and inter
relating observations to point to a visionary end which is,
by its very nature, intuitive and intentional.
Coleridge consistently permits these internal dynam
ics, and he suggests the possibility of vision through an
emotional and intellectual acceptance of man's dualistic
condition. In employing phenomenological method, Coleridge
ioes not limit the phenomenon of essence. He seems to
employ the method of phenomenological reduction to isolate
T2
the experience of intuition and vision. He would then seem
to radicalize the method itself by using it to distinguish
authentic from unauthentic intentionality (i.e., the criter
ion of a higher state of consciousness. In this sense
Coleridge moves beyond dualisms and monisms toward an
affirmation of the creative evolution of man which might
also be called a radical phenomenology of vision. Coleridge
rarrives at this radical, i.e., essential, transcendental
statement by suggesting both an epistemology and a meta
physics based on phenomenological principles.
And finally, as a kind of summary to this prospec
tus, perhaps it is helpful to point out that the meaningful
association between phenomenological thought and that of
Coleridge has been made before. Thomas McFarland in his
comprehensive and sympathetic study, Coleridge and the
Pantheist Tradition, says that our understanding of Cole
ridge's philosophy
. . . must be necessarily inferential, for he cus
tomarily presents us with completed opinions based
on unexpressed arguments rather than with the process
of argument itself. But I suspect that the process
in formal terms would bear a close resemblance to
the kind of extended re-thinking of the implications
of the cognito that Husserl labors toward in his
Ideas (toward a phenomenological philosophy) . . .
Certainly Coleridge speaks the language of twentieth
century phenomenology when he asks, "Who can compre
hend his own will; or his own personeity, that is
his I-Ship; or his own mind, that is his person; or
IS
his own life? But we can distinctly apprehend them."
The question is basic. In its assertion of the in
commensurability of the "I," it provides the ground,
in what Husserl calls "primordial experience," for
the recognition of the untranslatability of conscious
ness .
Footnotes
"^Maurice Natanson, ed., Essays in Phenomenology (The
Hague, 1966), p. 21.
2
Edmund Husserl, Ideas (London: Collier-Macmillan,
Ltd., 1931), p. 72.
3
Marvin Father, Phenomenology and Existence (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1967), p. 107, notes
that Husserl uses Descartes as a point of departure. Des
cartes never doubted man's ability to record his experience
of the world accurately, whereas Husserl distrusted man's
"senses" as well as his doctrines.
4
Natanson, p. 11. See also, for example, Bertrand
Russell in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (New York:
Bantam, 1968), p. 202. Russell speaks of the peculiar men
tal strain involved in writing the Principia Mathematica.
It was as if the toil of pure method caused the mind to
turn in upon itself. Russell says, "At the time I often
wondered whether I should ever come out at the other end of
the tunnel in which I seemed to be. . . . I used to stand
on the footbridge at Kennington, near Oxford, watching the
trains go by, and determining that tomorrow I would place
myself under one of them. But when the morrow came. I
always found myself hoping that perhaps Principia Mathe
matica would be finished some day . . . so I persisted, and
in the end the work was finished, but my intellect never
quite recovered from the strain. I have been-ever since
definitely less capable of dealing with difficult abstrac
tions than I was before. This is part, though by no'means
the whole, of the reason for the change in the nature of my
work." For Husserl, Russell's objectivist dilemma would
have been ascribed to the psychological strain implicit in
all attempts at mental imposition; recognizing imposition
as a descriptive category of the mind alleviates both the
desire to impose and the psychological strain of that desire,
3A
JS
5
Colin Wilson, Introduction to the New Existential
ism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), p. 54.
6
Colin Wilson, Eagle and Earwig (London: John Baker
Publisher, Ltd., 1965), pp. 93-94.
7
Husserl, p. 117.
8
Marvin Farber, The Foundation of Phenomenology
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1943), p. 333.
To see conscious acts as "experiences of meaning" is also
Merleau Ponty's emphasis in his Phenomenology of Perception
(New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). For Ponty,
"The world is not what I think, but what I live thru."
Experience thus structures one's mind; the mind does not
structure experience. The mind, however, is not Locke's
tabula rosa; rather the experience which structures the
mind is what Ponty calls "Sinngenesis," literally "the ori
gin of meaning," that is the mind is defined by an arche
type— that beginning or Ursprung of consciousness which
governs the collective human mind. Meaning, therefore, is
coincidental with the genesis of the structure of the mind.
Individual experience simply provides a stage for the vari
ous human manifestations of that structure. It is always
the structure which has meaning and it is to an understand
ing of the structure that the phenomenologist devotes his
energies. The phenomenological reductions of both Husserl
and Merleau Ponty are really very much like the transforma
tions of Chomsky's transformational grammar— one engages in
various methodological transformations in order to return
to and define one essential residuum which generates the
categories and language of the human mind.
9
Natanson, p. 18.
10
Husserl, pp. 258-59.
"^See Wilson, Introduction, pp. 58-61; and Natanson,
p. 17.
12
Husserl, p. 113.
13
Natanson, p. 18.
36
■^Some critics have suggested that Husserl was not
fully in control of what he was theorizing, but as Natanson
says, "Certainly no philosopher was ever harder on himself
than was Husserl, and few academicians today would, I think,
have the intellectual courage Husserl showed in withdrawing
a completed work from the printer's table because he felt
not fully satisfied with his formulation," p. 20.
1 ^
Wilson, Introduction, pp. 91-92.
1
xoAllen Tate, The Hovering Fly and Other Essays
(Boston: Cummington Press, 1949), p. 151.
17
For example, see Herbert Spiegelberg, Phenomenol
ogy in Psychology and Psychiatry: A Historical Introduction
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 101,
415-18, 421-42, 516-62, 579, 658-72; also Fritz Kaufmann,
"Art and Phenomenology," in Essays in Phenomenology, ed.
Maurice Natanson, pp. 144-57; and Remy C. Kwant, Phenome
nology of Language (Pittsburgh, 1965), pp. 1-272. See also
fn. 8 above. The most interesting and dynamic example
though of a critic searching for a theory of language that
corresponds to the "particular inheritance and partial
desolation of our culture" is George Steiner, Language and
Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. ix-x. Steiner's
argument is that language--especially the language of the
critic— is too often silent, that is, it fails to assimilate
the empirical demands and transformations of history.
Therefore language, instead of being a vehicle for explicat
ing and delineating the whole range of contemporary private
and social experience, becomes a means of avoiding confron
tation with the ever-increasing terrors of immediacy. Lan
guage is silent about the phenomena of our total experi
ence— past, present, and future; in a phenomenology of lan
guage one would seek to find expression, understanding, and
recollection for the silences that exist between our behav
ior and what we write or say about that behavior. Steiner
says:
To think of literature, of education, of lan
guage, as if nothing very important had happened to
challenge our very concept of these activities seems
to me unrealistic. To read Aeschylus or Shakespeare—
let alone to "teach" them— as if the texts, as if the
authority of the texts in our own lives, were immune
from recent history, is subtle but corrosive
illiteracy. This does not mean any indiscriminate or
journalistic test of "present relevance"; it means that
one tries to take seriously the complex miracle of
the survivance of great art, of what answer we can
give to it from our own being.
We come after. We know that a man can read Goethe
or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and
Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in
the morning. To say that he has read them without
understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In
what way does this knowledge bear on literature and
society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from
the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that
culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of
spirit are transferable to those of conduct? More
over, it is not only the case that the established
media of civilization— the universities, the arts,
the book world— failed to offer adequate resistance
to political bestiality; they often rose to welcome
it and to give it ceremony and apology. Why? What
are the links, as yet scarcely understood, between
the mental, psychological habits of high literacy and
the temptations of the inhuman? Does some great
boredom and surfeit of abstraction grow up inside
literate civilization preparing it for the release
of barbarism? Many of these notes and essays try to
find ways of asking the question more fully and pre
cisely .
In method and scope I am aiming at something dif
ferent from literary criticism. Knowing well where
these essays fall short, I nevertheless want them
to suggest the goal of a "philosophy of language."
To arrive at such a philosophy should be the next
step if we wish to come nearer an understanding of
the particular inheritance and partial desolation of
our culture, of that which has undermined and that
which may restore the resources of insight in modern
society. A philosophy of language, as Leibniz and
Herder understood the term, will turn to the study
of literature with especial intensity; but it will
think of literature as inevitably implicated in the
larger structures of semantic, formal, symbolic
communication. It will think of philosophy, as
Wittgenstein has taught it to do, as language in a
condition of supreme scruple, the word refusing to
take itself for granted. It will look to anthropology
38
for sustaining or correcting evidence of other liter
acies and structures of significance (how else are
we to "step back" from the illusory obviousness of
our own particular focus? A philosophy of language
will respond with wary fascination to the suppositions
of modern linguistics. It is in linguistics that
much of the intelligence once active in literary
criticism and history is now concentrated. That lit
erature and linguistics are close-bound has long been
known to the poets. As Roman Jakobson says: "The
poetic resources concealed in the morphological and
syntactic structure of language, briefly the poetry
of grammar, and its literary product, the grammar of
poetry, have been seldom known to critics and mostly
disregarded by linguists but skillfully mastered by
creative writers." A philosophy of language would
seek to get the relations right.
In short, it would return with that radical won
der habitually absent from literary criticism and
the academic study of literature, to the fact that
language is the defining mystery of man, that in it
his identity and historical presence are uniquely
explicit. It is language that severs man from the
deterministic signal codes, from the inarticulacies,
from the silences that inhabit the greater part of
being. If silence were to come again to a ruined
civilization, it would be a twofold silence, loud and
desparate with the rememberence of the Word.
1 8
Maurice Natanson, Literature, Philosophy, and the
Social Sciences (The Hague, 1962), p. 135.
19Ibid.
20
As for example, Viktor E. Frankl, Man1s Search for
leaning (New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1963), who
has founded the Austrian school of psychology distinguished
by the use of logotherapy, i.e., therapy based on the as
sumption that man's need for meaning is more imperative than
his need for sex or power. Related to this is the "Trans
actional" school in the United States which Wilson,(Intro
duction, .pp. 78-81) discusses.
21
Natanson, Literature, p. 98.
39
Ibid., pp. 88-89. Natanson notes that Rene
Welleck and Austin Warren (A Theory of Literature [New York:
1956], p. 26) in opting for "a rationale for the study of
literature" have the beginnings of a phenomenological con
cern, as do critics such as Susan Sontag ("Against Inter
pretation," in Controversy in Literature, ed. Morris Freed
man and Paul B. Davis [New York: Scribner, 1968], pp. 736-
745), with her insistent desire for an "erotics" rather than
"hermeneutics" of art; in effect she opts for epoche: the
act of placing all assumptions into hypothetical suspension
in order to prepare for a purified field of consciousness,
i.e., presentation not interpretation becomes the central
object of concern.
ary Criticism (Cleveland: Meridian Books, The World Pub
lishing Company, 1966), p. viii.
New Literary History, 1 (1969): 53-69, suggests a more
rigorous analysis of the reductions involved in defining
the "total critical act; that is to say, the exploration of
that mysterious interrelationship which, through the media
tion of reading and of language, is established to our mutu
al satisfaction between the work read and myself" (p. 63).
In a careful survey of some six European critics (Jacques
Riviere, Jean-Pierre-Richard, Maurice Blanchot, Jean
Starobinski, Jean Rousset, Marcel Raymond), Poulet suggests
that the successful critic maintains a delicate balance
between the perceptions of subject and object— i.e., in the
interrelationship between the reader and what is read a
critical method emerges which seeks to establish the founda
tion of that association— it is at best (Jean Rousset) "a
method which leads the seeker from the continuously changing
frontiers of form to what is beyond form'.' (p. 67) . And
Poulet, in traditional phenomenological style, immediately
23Morris Weitz, Hamlet and the Philosophy of Liter-
2^Ibid., p. 316.
^Natanson, Literature, p. 86.
26Ibid., p. 89.
O O
3 1
Georges Poulet, "The Phenomenology of Reading,"
^
cautions that in .such rigorous methodology, one might easily
be tempted to evade the motivation for the method. He says:
. . . there is the risk of overlooking an important
point. The aim of criticism is not achieved merely
by the understanding of the part played by the
subject in its interrelation with objects. When
reading a literary work, there is a moment when it
seems to me that the subject present in this work
disengages itself from all that surrounds it, and
stands alone. Had I not once the intuition of
this, when visiting the Scuola de San Rocco in
Venice, one of the highest summits of art, where
there are assembled so many paintings of the same
painter, Tintoretto? When looking at all these
masterpieces brought there together and revealing
so manifestly their unity of inspiration, I had
suddenly the impression of having reached the com
mon essence present in all the works of a great
master, an essence which I was not able to per
ceive, except when emptying my mind of all the
particular images created by the artist. I became
aware of a subjective power at work in all these
pictures, and yet never so clearly understood by
my mind as when I had forgotten all their particu
lar figurations.
One may ask oneself: What is this subject
left standing in isolation after all examination of
a literary work? Is it the individual genius of
the artist, visibly present in his work, yet having
an invisible life independent of the work? Or is
it, as Valery thinks, an anonymous and abstract
consciousness presiding, in its aloofness, over the
operations of all more concrete consciousness?
Whatever it may be, I am constrained to acknowledge
that all subjective activity present in a literary
work is not entirely explained by its relationship
with forms and objects within the work. There is
in the work a mental activity profoundly engaged in
objective forms; and there is, at another level,
forsaking all forms, a subject which reveals itself
to itself (and to me) in its transcendence over all
which is reflected in it. At this point, no object
can any longer express it, no structure can any
longer define it; it is exposed in its ineffabil-
ity and in its fundamental indeterminacy. Such is
perhaps the reason why the critic, in his elucida-
41
tion of works, is haunted by this transcendence of
mind. It seems then that criticism, in order to
accompany the mind in this effort of detachment
from itself, needs to annihilate, or at least
momentarily to forget, the objective elements of the
work, and to elevate itself to the apprehension of
a subjectivity without objectivity.
32
Husserl, Ideas, p. 13.
■^Ibid. , p. 29 .
34
The best of the critics who tend too easily to
embrace Coleridge as something of a muddler is Rene Wellek,
"The Concept of ’Romanticism' in Literary History," Compara
tive Literature, 1 (Winter and Spring, 1949). Wellek sug
gests that romanticism is not so much a single complex of
ideas as a set of associations centered around several key
terms (Imagination, Nature, Symbol, etc.), the meanings of
which undergo perpetual transformation. Wellek sees a
wealth of symbolic inference but no tangible philosophic
content in the romantics. Coleridge, in particular, becomes
for Wellek, a failure as a philosopher because he (Cole
ridge) reconciles totally incompatible perceptions by simply
allowing them to exist side by side. This criticism of
Coleridge as brilliant, but without a system to harness the
brilliance, fits in nicely with Wellek1s contention that
Coleridge's philosophic content continually shifts grounds;
but ironically, Wellek is too easily convinced by the too-
easy reconciliation that he sees. Richard Haven (Patterns
of Consciousness: An Essay on Coleridge [Amherts: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1969], p. 3) correctly points out
that this "kind of negative judgment . . . is the result of
certain kinds of expectations and demands." In the lan
guage of the phenomenologist intentionality subverts the
essence of Coleridge to being but a function of the critic's
mind. The phenomenologist looks for that "essential"
structure or pattern by which we can come to know the poet's
vision for ourselves. Haven says, "Let us accept Cole
ridge's failures. Then, as those hunting the whale some
times found in a rotten and worthless carcass, ambergris, so
we may find in Coleridge's fragments something more inter
esting and finally more significant than the systematic
philosophy which he could not produce."
^Haven, Patterns of Consciousness, pp. 5-6, out
lines what distinguishes his investigation of Coleridge:
As an aid to establishing more clearly a point
of departure, I should like to introduce two state
ments. The first is from Erich Neumann's The Ori
gins and History of Consciousness. "Every figure
in a work of art," Neumann says, ". . . requires a
dual interpretation, that is to say, a 'structural'
interpretation based on the nature of the figure
itself, and what we might call for short a "genetic"
interpretation which regards the figure as the expres
sion and exponent of the psyche, from which it springs.
. . . The fact that the poet's conscious mind uses
extraneous material for the creative process . . .
does not disprove the inner associations presupposed
by the genetic interpretation, for the selection and
modification of this material are decisive and typi
cal of the psychic situation." I should like to
add to this a remark by Herbert Read in The Forms of
Things Unknown. The object which the artist creates,
says Read,
is the objective correlative of an emotion,
a mood, an idea, or an intuition; in brief,
the realization of a state of consciousness.
. . . Consciousness . . . does not exist
apart from the object we are conscious of;
but we can induce consciousness by seeking
a correlative for feeling. . . . The object
the artist creates, therefore, corresponds
to his state of consciousness; it is his
consciousness of that object; it was not
first present in consciousness, and then
expelled like an egg: it grew into conscious
ness as it germinated. . . .
Read is speaking of a concrete object, "a plas
tic configuration, sounds, colours, shapes, masses
accessible to sensation," and both he and Neumann
are concerned with the genesis of works of art.
But what they say is often true as well of abstract
or theoretical formulations. The function of an
"object," verbal or otherwise, as a correlative for
consciousness depends not only on a qualitative cor-
_.v_respondence but also on structure, on, to use Read's
43
term, "configuration." And the same configurations
may be embodied in a poem or in a scientific or
philosophic theory, though the latter when so regarded
is being treated as art rather than as science or
philosophy.
In searching for both a qualitative and a structural "con
figuration" for Coleridge's abstract thought, Haven directly
suggests the phenomenological mode of coordinating method
and style to arrive at essence (vision).
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York:
Norton & Co., 1971), p. 14, like Haven, writes out of the
conviction that
Romantic thought and literature represented a deci
sive turn in Western Culture. The writers of that
age, in reinterpreting their cultural inheritance,
developed new modes of organizing experience, new
ways of seeing the outer world, and a new set of re
lations of the individual to himself, to nature, to
tiistory, and to his fellow men.
Abraham's search for these new modes is literally a phenom
enological investigation of all those parts of the romantic
achievement which indeed are greater than the whole. For
example, Abrams says, "In each section, I also look before
and after, back to the Bible, to Christian exegetic, devo
tional, and confessional literature, and to relevant aspects
of both exoteric and esoteric philosophy, and ahead as far
as some prominent writers in our own time." This distortion
of sequential time is a necessity for discovering the es
sence of phenomena through phenomenological method (see,
for example, Eugene Minkowski, Lived Time: Phenomenological
and Psychopathological Studies, trans. Nancy Metzel [Evans
ton: Northwestern University Press, 1970], pp. xxiii-xxvi).
For Abrams the romantic essence, arrived at by this juggling
of once and future associations, derives from
. . . the fact that they [the romantic writers]
undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of
creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and
values which had been based on the relation of the
creator to his creature and creation, but to reform
ulate them within the prevailing two-term system of
. r4
subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind
or consciousness and its transactions with nature.
In identifying and exploring these romantic reformulations,
Abrams comes up with patterns of consciousness that strik
ingly complement those of Richard Haven. If indeed both
critics may be said to be in search of phenomenological
essence as seen in the Romantics, their conclusions should
be both parallel and complimentary. This issue will be
explored further as I attempt to isolate the patterns of
method and vision that I find in the Biographia and the Rime
of the Ancient Mariner.
3 6
Husserl deals with the acts of transformation
(i.e., the governing tension between noesis and noema) in
the third section of Ideas, "Preliminary Considerations of
Method," and "The General Structures of Pure Consciousness,"
pp. 187-256. This method only briefly outlined in the ,
first part of this chapter becomes exceedingly complex in
practice, and throughout most of the Ideas, Husserl labors
to demonstrate that his distinctions, not so difficult in
and of themselves, become despairingly opaque when we try
to apprehend them psychologically. Before we can use the
phenomenological method or hope to create a phenomenological
language we must be convinced of Husserl's fundamental
starting point: namely that the phenomena of experience
transcend our own consciousness of these phenomena and that
we must, in order to see clearly for the first time, either
reverse the procedure (highly improbable) or find a method
by which the interaction of subject and object creates the
essences of phenomena and thus makes these essences appre-
hendable to consciousness (i.e., vision or the closest thing
to it). This interaction between subject and object takes
place in a spatialization of time. Henri Bergson, Time and
Free Wi11, .trans.vF.♦ L. Pogson (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1910), coined that particular way of saying that we
live and find our being within the duration of our associa
tions. For Bergson, spatial time was a descriptive way of
accounting for man's energy; that life force pulsated
through the eternal now, new and fresh (potentially) every
day. Time was not static but completely dynamic because it
was "pure duration." The stream of consciousness writers
appropriated Bergson's description, but they accurately
showed that (life force not to the contrary) it is precisely
man's functional dwelling in the eternal now that causes
such intense psychological pain. Since a method of
45
self-consciousness demands an explicit recognition of the
spatialization of time, Husserl was convinced that most
people would have a difficult time in ridding themselves of
intentionality which is the chief protection of a sequential
apprehension of time in which past, present, and future
become the security from which to create individual order.
The human pain of spatial time in which in an instant all
can be transformed because the time of the perceiver (sub
ject) and the time of the perceived (object) are almost
invariably out of joint is Husserl's subject in The Phenom
enology of Internal Time Consciousness (Bloomington: Uni
versity of Indiana Press, 1964), pp. 178-79. For comparison
see Coleridge Biographia Literaria, p. 73: "The act of
consciousness is indeed identical with time considered in
its essence (I mean time per se as contra-distinguished from
our notion of time; for time is always blended with the idea
of space, which as the contrary of time is therefore its
measure)."
Minkowski, Lived Time, p. 5, says:
Husserl's phenomenology and Bergson's philoso
phy were born in our times . . . because the corres
ponded to a real and deep need of our being. The
objective of the first was to study and describe
the phenomena of which life is composed without
allowing itself to be guided in this research by
any premise, whatever its origin or however legiti
mate it might appear. The second with remarkable
daring opposed intuition to intelligence, the living
^.o the dead, time to space. It was not long before
these two currents exercised a profound influence
over all contemporary thought.
Minkowski finds that ultimately the two thinkers merge in
their phenomenological concern for the discovery of the
essence of things, i.e., neither drifts into existential
despair or into a facile idealism; rather each learns to
make psychological pain almost irrelevant. In this context
it is perhaps easier to understand Husserl's repeated please
as to the deceptive and peculiar nature of our intentional
ity. The following passage from Ideas (pp. 255-56) is
representative of Husserl's caution and his ultimate subor
dination of method to the style of phenomenological concern:
---------------------------------------------------------------------- 515
The peculiarity of intentional experience is in its
general form easily indicated; we all understand the
expression "consciousness of something," especially
in the illustrations which we make for ourselves.
The harder is it to grasp the phenomenological pecu
liarities of the corresponding essence purely and
correctly. That this heading marks off a vast field
of toilsome discoveries, and eidetic discoveries at
that, still seems to the majority of philosophers and
psychologists (if we may judge from the literature
on the subject) to be something strange even to-day.
For no headway is made by simply seeing and saying
that every presenting refers to a presented, every
judgment to something judged, and so forth; nor in
deed if in addition one points to Logic, Epistemol-
ogy, and Ethics, with their numerous self-evidences,
and indicates these as belonging to the essential
nature of intentionality. That is also a very simple
way of claiming that the phenomenological doctrine
of the essence is something primitively old, a new
name for the old Logic and such disciplines as may
need to be ranked with it. For until we have grasped
the transcendental standpoint in its uniqueness, and
really appropriated the pure phenomenological ground,
though we may indeed use the word phenomenology, we
have not got the thing itself. Moreover, the mere
shifting of the standpoint, the mere effecting of the
phenomenological reduction, does not suffice to bring
such a thing as phenomenology out of pure logic.
For how far logical, and similarly pure ontological,
pure ethical, or any other such a priori propositions,
which one may cite in this connexion, express what is
really phenomenological, and to what phenomenological
strata they may in any given context belong, this is
in no sense obvious at first sight. On the contrary,
there lie concealed here the most difficult problems
of all, the meaning of which is naturally hidden from
all those who have not as yet any knkling of the basic
distinctions upon which all the others depend. As
a matter of fact (if I may venture a judgment based
on my own experience), it is a long and thorny way
that leads from the insights of pure logic, from
those of the theory of meaning, from ontological and
noetical insights, and likewise from the current
normative and psychological theory of knowledge, to
the apprehension of immanent-psychological and then
47
phenomenological data, and lastly to all the essen
tial connexions which make the transcendental rela
tions intelligible a priori. Similar considerations
apply, wheresoever we fix our effort on the attempt
to find a way through from objective insights to
the phenomenological that essentially belong to them.
Thus "consciousness of something" is at one and
the same time very obvious and highly obscure. The
false tracks into which our first reflexions lead us,
as we thread the maze, easily generate a scepticism
which denies the inconvenient problem in all its
bearings. Not a few shut themselves out altogether
from the start because they cannot bring themselves
to grasp intentional experience, the experience of
perception, for instance, in company with its own
proper essence as such. They do not succeed because
they cannot replace the practice of living in per
ception, their attention turned towards the perceived
object both in observation and in theoretical inquiry,
by that of directing their glance upon the perceiving
itself, or upon the way in which the perceived object
with its distinguishing features is presented, and
of taking that which presents itself in the immanent
analysis of the essence just as it actually does pre
sent itself. If the right standpoint has been won
and entrenched through practice, if above all there
has been acquired the courage to follow up the clear
essential data with an entire absence of all preju
dice, and indifference to all current and borrowed
theories, firm results follow forthwith, the same
for all who adopt the same position. There follow
as well-established possibilities the power of pass
ing on to others what one has seen oneself, or test
ing the descriptions of others, sifting out intrusive
phrases void of meaning they have slipped in unno
ticed, and of exposing and eliminating errors which
here too are possible, as they are in every sphere
in which validity counts for something, by a further
appeal to intuition. But now to the matters them
selves !
For a complete study of phenomenological method and
luman psychology, see especially Joseph J. Kockelman's
Sdmund Husserl's Phenomenological Psychology; A Historico-
2ritical Study (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967)
and also Edo Pivcevic, Husserl and Phenomenology (London:
Hutchinson, 1970), pp. 34-55 for a logical positivist view
of the subject, and Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of
His Phenomenology, translated by Edward G. Ballard and
Lester F. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1967), pp. 90-101.
37
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria,
ed. and intro. George Watson (New York: Dutton, 1965),
p. 148.
3®Occult and esoteric are used in the sense of
Minkowski's reference to Bergson (cf. fn. 36 above).
Husserl realized that all phenomena, even those inimical to
his own formulations of method, should by definition be
allowed the credibility of examination. Thus Minkowski
sees Bergson as a phenomenologist of intuition who bridges
life and death, the seen and the unseen. Parapsychology,
and the so-called occult practices from astrology and
alchemy to meditation thus become further "doors of percep
tion" into the phenomena of essence. Husserl himself
drifted towards a more Kantian sort of idealism in which
the abstract unknown remained just that: both abstract and
unknown. M. H. Abrams (see fn. 35 above) makes no secret
of his intense interest in the esoteric traditions surround
ing the romantics. Some of Coleridge's more oblique asso
ciations in the Biographia and particularly in the Rime are
more like foreshadowings of the spiritualistic philosophies
and paths of meditation that emerged in clusters around the
turn of the twentieth century. For example, P. D. Ouspen-
sky, Russian mystic and for a time a student of Gurdjieff,
creates a system for cosmic consciousness that is based on
a carefully executed reaction to Kant. In Tertium Organum
(New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, 1970),
pp. 18-19, Ouspensky sees Kant not so much as the man in
search of categories and a system but rather as a man in
venting ingenious exercises for the development of con
sciousness into a fourth dimension for which there is of
course no language. In a later chapter we will note some
interesting comparisons between the language that Coleridge
sought for his distinctions (such as fancy and imagination)
and the language that Ouspensky actually employed in his
evolutionary conception of man. It is perhaps no accident
that in the symbolism of the Tarot Coleridge is often
ascribed to the Juggler or Magician. Ouspensky, A New Model
of the Universe (New York: Vintage Books, a division of
Random House, 1971), pp. 202-3, suggests the appropriateness
af this association in his description of the card:
I saw a strange-looking man.
His figure clad in a multi-coloured jester's
dress stood between earth and sky. His feet were
hidden in grass and flowers; and his head, in a
large hat with strangely turned-up brim, resembling
the sign of eternity, disappeared in the clouds.
In one hand he held the magic wand, the sign of
fire, with one end pointing to the sky; and with
the other hand he was touching the pentacle, the
sign of earth, which lay in front of him on a trav
elling juggler's stall, side by side with the cup
and the sword, the signs of water and air.
Like lightning there flashed in me the realisa
tion that I saw the four magical symbols in action.
The face of the Juggler was radiant and confi
dent. His hands flitted about swiftly as though
playing with the four signs of the elements, and I
felt that he held some mysterious threads which con
nected the earth with the distant luminaries.
His every movement was full of significance,
and every new combination of the four symbols created
long series of unexpected phenomena. My eyes were
dazzled. I could not follow everything that was pre
sented.
For whom is all this performance? I asked myself.
Where are the spectators?
And I heard the Voice saying:
"Are spectators necessary? Look at him more
closely."
I again lifted my eyes to the man in a jester's
dress, and I saw that he was changing all the time.
Innumerable crowds seemed to pass and pass in him
before me, disappearing before I could tell myself
what I saw. And I understood that he himself was
both the Juggler and the spectators.
At the same time I saw myself in him, reflected
as in a mirror, and it seemed to me that I was look
ing at myself through his eyes. But another feeling
told me that there was nothing in front of me but
the blue sky and that within myself a window opened,
through which I saw unearthly things and heard un
earthly words.
50
Colin Wilson, The Occult; A History (New York:
Random House, 1971), pp. 318-49, explicitly associates "the
nineteenth century: magic and romanticism"; and Joseph Henry
Green, Spiritual Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 186 5), sug
gests that such a philosophy can indeed be based on Cole
ridge. At their best the occult and the esoteric doctrines
provide a wider range of both experience and language for
phenomenological transformations.
A further correlation is the scope of mental trans
formations involved in fantasy. Jorge Luis Borges, Other
Inquisitions, "The Flower of Coleridge," (New York: Wash
ington Square Press, 1966), pp. 9-10, quotes one of Cole
ridge's lines of fantastic imaginings, "'If a man could pass
through Paradise in a dream and have a flower presented to
him as a pledge that his sould had really been there, and
if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke— Ay!— and
what then?'" Borges comments:
I wonder what my reader thinks of that imagin
ing. To me it is perfect. It seems quite impos
sible to use it as the basis of other inventions,
for it has the integrity and the unity of a . . .
final goal. And, of course, it is just that; in the
sphere of literature as in others, every act is the
culmination of an infinite series of causes and the
cause of an infinite series of effects. Behind
Coleridge's idea is the general and ancient idea of
the generations of lovers who begged for a flower as
a token.
The phenomenologist, just like Borges, would seek to isolate
the essential, common experience (emotion) on which the fan
tasy is based. Fantasy turns quickly to the occult, how-
sver. In "The Dream of Coleridge," pp. 13-17, Borges talks
about an uncanny relationship between Coleridge's "Kubla
Khan," published in 1816, and a very similar fourteenth-
century Persian fragment published in the west only in 1836.
Borges says:
A thirteenth-century Mongolian emperor dreams
a palace and then builds it according to his dream;
an eighteenth-century English poet (who could not
have known that the structure was derived from a
dream) dreams a poem about the palace. In compari
son with this symmetry, which operates on the souls
51
of sleeping men and spans continents and centuries,
the levitations, resurrections, and apparitions in
the sacred books are not so extraordinary.
But how shall we explain it? Those who automat
ically reject the supernatural (I try, always, to
belong to this group) will claim that the story of
the two dreams is merely a coincidence, a chance
delineation, like the outlines of lions or horses we
sometimes see in clouds. Others will argue that the
poet somehow found out that the Emperor had dreamed
the palace, and then said he had dreamed the poem in
order to create a splendid fiction that would also
palliate or justify the truncated and rhapsodic qual
ity of the verses. That conjecture seems reasonable,
but it obliges us to postulate, arbitrarily, a text
not identified by Sinologists in which Coleridge was
able to read, before 1816, and about Kubla's dream.
Hypotheses that transcend reason are more appealing.
One such theory is that the Emperor's soul penetrated
Coleridge's, enabling Coleridge to rebuild the
destroyed palace in words that would be more lasting
than marble and metal.
The first dream added a palace to reality; the
second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem
(or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace.
The similarity of the dreams reveals a plan; the
enormous length of time involved reveals a superhu
man performer. To inquire the purpose of that im
mortal or long-lived being would perhaps be as fool
hardy as futile, but it seems likely that he has not
yet achieved it. In 1691 Father Gerbillon of the
Society of Jesus confirmed that ruins were all that
was left of the palace of Kubla Khan; we know that
scarcely fifty lines of the poem were salvaged.
Those facts give rise to the conjecture that the
series of dreams and labors has not yet ended. The
first dreamer was given the vision of the palace and
he built it; the second, who did not know of the
other's dream, was given the poem about the palace.
If the plan does not fail, some reader of "Kubla
Khan" will dream, on a night centuries removed from
us, of marble or of music. This man will not know
that two others also dreamed. Perhaps the series of
52
dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one who dreams
will have the key.
After writing all this, I perceive--or think
that I perceive— another explanation. Perhaps an
archetype not yet revealed to men, an eternal object
(to use Whitehead's term), is gradually entering the
world; its first manifestation was the palace; its
second was the poem. Whoever compared them would
have seen that they were essentially the same.
3 9
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans.
Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960). The Meditations
contain Husserl's most formal philosophic thought. Paul
Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, pp.
175-95, gives a substantive analysis that distinguishes the
idealism of Husserl from that of Kant.
40
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 145.
41
Ricoeur, Husserl, pp. 186-88.
42Coleridge, Biographia, p. 85.
4^Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice, illustrated
by John Tenniel, with an introduction and notes by Martin
Gardner (New York: Bramhall House, 1960), p. 26. See also
fn. 38 above.
44
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 149.
45 .
Haven, Patterns of Consciousness, p. 2.
46Walter Jackson Bate (Coleridge [New York: Macmil
lan, 1968], p. 2) suggests a strained psychological basis
for Coleridge's adult vascillations:
In his mature years, his hunger for approval or
love and his dread of disapproval were to lead him
to oscillate between these two extremes: on the one
hand an apologetic self-effacement, in which he
could stand aside and find his satisfactions vicar
iously; on the other hand, an impetuous brilliance of
discourse usually in support of the most approved
sentiments. In his most successful work we find some
interplay of both, and it is when something very
different from either is needed that hesitation and
paralysis of will begin to appear.
^As for example/ Coleridge's discussion of Hobbes'
system of human language as one continued process of asso
ciation, Biographia, pp. 56-57.
48
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 143.
A 9
Ibid., p. 146.
“^Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist
Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 18.
"531
CHAPTER II
COLERIDGE AND EPISTEMOLOGY:
BIOGRAPHIA I-IV
For the metaphysics of a "phenomenologist" in any
historical period, no matter what his objectivist or sub
jectivist inclination, it is short sighted to exclude the
visionary object from the empirical subject. For Coleridge
there is an active interweaving of things in themselves and
our thoughts (our perception of things). He says, "In our
perceptions we seem to ourselves merely passive to an exter
nal power whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape or as
a blank canvas on which some unknown hand paints it."'*' The
human mind or psyche (subject) is not just a mirror or a
blank canvas; it is in fact a co-creator of "reality" which
iiffers from the objects of perception, not in degree but in
kind. "The first lesson of philosophic discipline," Cole
ridge says, "is to wean the student's attention from the
legree of things, which alone form the vocabulary of common
Life, and to direct it to the kind abstracted from the
54 __________ __
3 3
2
degree." Philosophy begins not by equating subject and
object, nor by having one engulf the other, but by a process
of recognition in which the separate function of each is
explored within the context of a common source.
For it is worthy of notice [Coleridge says]
that . . . idealism may be traced to sources equal
ly remote with . . . materialism; and yet . . .
these conjectures concerning the mode in which our
perceptions originated, could not alter the natural
difference of things and thoughts.^
Husserl says that we must precede any philosophical
investigation with a consciousness of infinite possibili
ties; we cannot assume that there is an arbitrary tension
between subject and object; rather, we must investigate with
as much "science" as is at our command the implications of a
subject/object split which is a "fact" of perception rather
than an a priori designation. The infinite possibilities
are the metaphysical associations of an extensive phenome
nology regarding the experience of perception. These
transcendent possibilities emerge into consciousness and
expression by association with a phenomenological method
which begins with the procedure of finding and delineating
the foundation common to subject and object. Husserl says,
The entire absence of this procedure, the over
looking of the immense difficulties attaching to a
correct beginning, or the covering up of the same
through the haste to have done with them, had this
for its consequence, that we had and have many philo-
56
sophical "systems" or directions, but not the one
philosophy which in idea underlies ail the philosoph-
ophies that can be imagined.^
It is such a foundation which Coleridge calls, in
Chapter XII of the Biographia, his "Dynamic philosophy," and
it can be more "scientifically arranged" or explicated than
can Husserl's "underlying Idea." But like Husserl's "under
lying Idea," Coleridge's philosophy is dynamic because it
points toward a process which by association yields a
transcendental metaphysic which serves as a beginning and a
model for "all the philosophies that can be imagined." The
phenomenological aspect of such a process is always to begin
at the beginning, not to become rooted in "systems" of
thought that may be superbly complete but also completely
arbitrary. Opposites such as subject or object or the
assumptions of realists and idealists are not so much recon
ciled as examined to determine the perceptual experiences
which surround them. Thus Coleridge concentrates in his
metaphysics on a theory of imagination which demonstrates
the resources we have for identifying how we perceive and
what the visionary associations are of such a process. We
may never reach the synthesis of a Logosophia, the pure
understanding of the meaning of our talents and of the
universals to which they are linked, but we will begin the
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5-7
charting of a process which at some future human prospect
may result in just such an evolutionary synthesis. Husserl
writes in, that Coleridgean vein of sustaining the beginning
exploration of a metaphysic within the context of a vision
that demands radical method.. Husserl evokes a
. . . science of Beginnings, a "first" philosophy—
that all philosophical disciplines, the very founda
tions of all sciences whatsoever, spring from its
matrix— all this must needs have remained implicit
since the radicalism was lacking without which philos
ophy generally could not be, could not even make a
start.
Coleridge attempts such a Beginning for philosophy
in the Biographia. His method in the early chapters is one
of consistently differentiating himself from the presuppo
sitions and concerns of his contemporaries and from the
general history of philosophy (the method of phenomenologi
cal reduction). In chapters I through IV, for example,
Coleridge defines himself as one who has come to recognize
the importance of process and sequence, form and context, in
the experience of learning (chapter I), of alienation and
sensibility in men of absolute genius who provide a model
for the experience of learning (chapter II) and a model for
alternatives to despotic thinking (chapter III) through the
luman capacity for imagination which is the touchstone for
the process by which such alternative consciousness is
58
possible (chapter IV). In chapters XII and XIII this act of
self-definition, of setting himself apart, results in an
effort to identify and explain what is left (the residuum)
after the philosophical presumptions of others have been
understood, i.e., reduced to their common origin (essence),
which then becomes the point of departure for the beginning
of any authentic metaphysical investigation.
In chapter XII Coleridge describes the essence which
we must reach in order to begin a metaphysic:
All the certainty of our knowledge depends on the
immediate which dwells in every man, and on the orig
inal intuition or absolute affirmation of it (which
is likewise in every man, but does not in every man
rise to consciousness) . . . and . . . the medium by
which such spirits understand each other is not the
surrounding air, but the freedom which they possess
in common, as the common ethereal element of their
being, the tremulous reciprocations of which propa
gate themselves even to the inmost of the soul.
Where the spirit of a man is not filled with the
consciousness of freedom (were it only from its
restlessness, as of one still struggling in bondage)
all spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only
with others but even with himself.®
Ultimately the alternatives to categorical thinking emerge
from the consciousness of freedom, which is the common heri
tage of the human spirit. Coleridge is only too aware that
this "immediate . . . original intuition or absolute affir
mation" of our freedom "does not in every man rise to
consciousness." Chapters V through XIII are devoted not so
591
much to Coleridge's metaphysics, a logosophia that remains
mysterious throughout the Biographia, but more to the impli
cations of an epistemology where Coleridge tries to show us
how to become conscious of the "freed" state of mind from
which alone it becomes possible to learn and know. In
these chapters of the Biographia Coleridge provides the con
tent of idealism and materialism with the intention of
freeing the mind from the tyranny of both and then engaging
the mind to explore the infinite possibilities that rest
behind the prison of categorical thought. Coleridge bluntly
states that
Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy
during the two or three last centuries cannot but
admit that there appears to have existed a sort of
secret and tacit compact among the learned not to
pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science.
The privilege of free thought, so highly extolled,
has at no time been held valid in actual practice
except within this limit; and not a single stride
beyond it has ever been ventured without bringing
obloquy on the transgressor.^
Coleridge acknowledges what is within that "certain
limit," the virtues of the idealists, the empiricists, the
associationists of all shades; but he is especially thankful
to the mystics for inspiring him not to be content with an
easy virtue.
The feeling of gratitude which I cherish towards
these men . . . these mystics acted in no slight
degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned
60
within the outline of any single dogmatic system.
They contributed to keep alive the heart in the head;
gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working pre
sentment. That all the products of the mere reflec
tive faculty partook of death, and were as the rat
ling of twigs and sprays in winter into which a sap
was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had
not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either
food or shelter. If they were too often a cloud of
smoke to me by day, yet they were always a pillar of
fire throughout the night . . .®
By yearning to penetrate to the root of human energy or life
force, Coleridge implies that we unlock the consciousness of
our freedom. We are then free to imagine.
The terminology of chapters XII and XIII designates
imagination as the common, presuppositionless human exper
ience. In suggesting a theory and language of imagination
Coleridge tries to give expression to the "cloud of smoke"
in which each man can find a "pillar of fire," a Way or Tao,
to guide and give clarity to his own metaphysical explora-
9
tions. In part II of the Biographia Coleridge then quite
naturally suggests that there is also a "science of begin-
ings" for questions of aesthetics and critical theory, and
he goes on to explain his own model for making literary
judgments.
Taken as a whole, the philosophical result in the
Biographia is always the phenomenological one in which as
lusserl says,
61
. . . the far horizons . . . the chief structural
formations . . . have disclosed themselves; the essen
tial groups of problems and the methods of approach
on essential lines have been made clear . . . and the
author sees the infinite open country of the true
philosophy, the "promised land," on which he himself
will never set foot.
Psychologically, the result is the romantic sensibility,
the yearing for things that never seem to be, the alienation
and suffering of the prophet/teacher, the evoking of an
archetype; the wise old man or woman in the human psyche who
gives guidance to each man's quest and integrates such
infinite variety of subjects with whatever holy grail
emerges as their common object. The experience is a. trans
cendental one, and its common denominator is always one of
growth, a balanced evolution of body, mind, and soul."*'^
In chapter I Coleridge makes a curious statement of
his general intentions:
It will be found that the least of what I have* written
concerns myself personally. I have used the narra
tion chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity
to the work, in part for the sake of the miscellane
ous reflections suggested to me by particular events;
but still more as introductory to the statement of my
principles . . . and the application of the rules
deduced from philosophical principles to poetry and
criticism.^
3ere is a "biographia," the content of which is only in the
least personal, suggesting that the principles themselves
are of primary importance even though a self-consciousness,
------------------: ----------------------------------------------- 5^
13
or as P. D. Ouspensky would say, a "self-remembering," of
biographical experience must necessarily be the vehicle by
which those "philosophical principles" become apparent. In
this first chapter, Coleridge begins the process of deriving
a metaphysics by the association of principles with personal
experience. In his youth, he says, he learned early the
virtues of a classic simplicity. Under his "very sensible
14
though at the same time very severe master," he studied
the epic heritage of Homer and Milton and learned that
"poetry, even that of the loftiest and seemingly that of
the wildest odes, had a logic of its own as severe as that
of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more
complex and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In
the truly great poets . . . there is a reason assignable,
not only for every word, but for the position of every
word. 1,15
This lesson "not only made Coleridge aware of "ob
scurity and a general turgidness of diction" in his "small
volume of juvenile poems," but also that he had "forgot to
inquire whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a
degree of attention unsuitable to the nature and objects of
poetry.""*'^ Before his fifteenth year he had come to under
stand that form and content are equally important and
El
interdependent. One must, not only say something well, but
one must have something of value to say. Such is the re
sponsibility and gift of intellect:
Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be
well aware that I shall perhaps stand alone in my
creed, and that it will be well if I subject myself
to no worse charge than that of singularity; I am
not therefore deterred from avowing that I regard and
even have regarded the obligations of intellect among
the most sacred of the claims of gratitude. A valu
able thought, or a particular train of thoughts,
gives me additional pleasure when I can safely refer
and attribute it to the conversation or correspondence
of another.^
The same pleasure of associating "valuable" thoughts within
the consciousness of a "safe" (severe, devoted to uncovering
essentials, hence phenomenological) methodology is Cole
ridge's way of choosing to begin at the beginning with a
questioning, eager intellect conscious of ideas, their value
and expression; in doing so, he differentiates himself from
those
. . . prodigies of self-conceit, shallowness, arro
gance and infidelity! Instead of storing the memory,
during the period when the memory is the predominant
faculty, with facts for the after exercise of the
judgment; and instead of awakening by the noblest
models the first and unlimited love and admiration
which is the natural and graceful temper of early
youth, these nurslings of improved pedagogy are taught
to dispute and decide; to suspect all but their own
and their lecturer's wisdom; and to hold nothing
sacred from their contempt but their own contemptible
arrogance; boy graduates in all the technicals and in
all the dirty passions and impudence of anonymous
criticism.
------- gT5
Coleridge, like the phenomenologist, is aware that
the sequence of the learning experience is crucial; to
develop the faculties which can "dispute" and "decide" before
"awakening" the qualities of "unmixed love and admiration"
is to become narrow and regimented and to be forever impris
oned by convenient "wisdoms" which are not authentic because
they "hold nothing sacred from their contempt." The
"infidelity" is to "the natural and graceful temper of early
youth" when one must allow the experience of feeling love
and admiration (the German "sehnsucht") for the true, the
good, and the beautiful. In this yearning lies the origin
af a transcendental state; it evokes the idea of a phenome
nological reality in which vision of a minor key (based on
feelings) precedes the more austere and equally necessary
processes of intellect (based on reason). The great poets
and philosophers are always faithful to this original "spot
of time," that moment when in early youth we have the
"grace" to experience the "natural" memory of objective
meaning for the first time. That epiphany will lead to the
joyful contemplation of thoughts and associations ordered by
reason and transformed by imagination; and the metaphysic
that emerges will have as its natural foundation "a continu
ous under-current of feeling . . . everywhere present, but
seldom anywhere as a separate excitement." The alternative,
Coleridge says, is to be unfaithful to the human capacity
for genuine insight, to be good at "technicals . . . and in
all the dirty passions and impudence of anonymous criticism
..." like
. . . our faulty elder poets sacrificed to the pas
sion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties
of intellect and to the starts of wit; the moderns
to the glare and glitter of a perpetual yet broken
and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious
something, made up half of image and half of abstract
meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head,
the other both heart and head to point and drapery.
Engaging in his own process of phenomenological
reduction, Coleridge concludes that we must begin any ab
stract speculation with what and how we felt when we were
still capable of an honest passion. Then we must use our
reason to remember those original feelings and to associate
them with experiences, thoughts, values, and with the
dilemma of their expression (content vs. form).
In chapter II Coleridge tries to account for the
"supposed irritability of men of genius," which is to say
that they have the reputation for irritability because they
are the misunderstood and long-suffering teachers of every
generation who, like Coleridge himself,
. . . have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of
this wilderness, the world, . . . The.greater part
indeed have been trod underfoot and are forgotten;
66
but yet no small number have crept forth into life,
some to furnish feathers for the caps of others, and
still more to plume the shafts in the quivers of my
enemies, of them that unprovoked have lain in wait
against my soul.^
But the fact that genius does bring forth "life" is the
crucial part, and the "indignation," Coleridge says, "I
leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford
2 2
it." The actual subject of this chapter thus becomes a
further attempt to identify the human qualities necessary
for a "natural" beginning to the creation of a philosophy.
If the initial stage of learning is one of experiencing a
feeling of meaning and remembering it, then the second step
is to place that "spot of time" into a mental context
(Wordsworth's recollections in tranquility)
. . . where the ideas are vivid and there exists an
endless power of combining and modifying them . . .
then the feelings and affections blend more easily
and intimately with these ideal creatings than with
the objects of the senses; the mind is affected by
thoughts rather than by things; and only then feels
the requisite interest even for the most important
events and accidents, which by means of meditation
they have passed into thoughts.^3
The "endless power" born of ideas that are vivid is the
origin of what Coleridge later calls the "esemplastic
power," which is imagination which both creates and derives
an understanding of "reality" by passing (transforming) the
experience of a spot of time (feelings of meaning and their
F7I
association) into thoughts.
And again Coleridge says a great deal by implica
tion, by differentiating men of "absolute genius" from men
of "commanding genius" (as distinguished from "mere tal
ent") . In the latter instance, "the conceptions of the
mind may be so vivid and adequate as to preclude that
24
impulse to the realizing of them." Men of absolute genius
"rest content between thought and reality, as it were, in an
intermundium of which their own living spirit supplies the
25
substance, and their imagination the ever-varying form."
Men of commanding genius, however,
. . . must impress their preconceptions on the
world without in order to present them back to their
own view with the satisfying degree of clearness,
distinctness and individuality. These in tranquil
times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem . . .
But alas! in times of tumult they are the men des
tined to come forth as the shaping spirit of Ruin,
to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute
the fancies of a day, and to change kings and king
doms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds.^
The difference is an important one. Absolute geniuses
internalize thought and the reality of feeling to the higher
faculties of "their own living spirit" which is able to
realize (understand intuitively) the object of such associ
ations and to give that object, via one facet of the imagi
nation, an infinite number of forms in expression and
action. Coleridge anticipates here the "content" of his
68
terminology in which he makes the well-known distinctions
between Reason and Understanding and among Fancy, Primary
Imagination, and Secondary Imagination. For now, however,
it is enough to show that the "model" man does not need to
impress his preconceptions on the world without in order to
see them clearly, to realize them within himself. The model
for man is to "live" in an "intermundium" between thought
and reality where it is not necessary to objectify thoughts
or feelings in order to know them. One "knows" by a trans
forming process in which one experiences equally absolute
objectivity (substance) and infinite relativity (the ever-
varying form of substance). To do otherwise is seemingly to
violate again a natural order of things in which one exter
nalizes feelings and thoughts in order to understand and
recognize them. The objectifying activity of the mind takes
place before the living spirit within has been given the
:hance to supply substance and the transforming power of
imagination. The result is at best a fickle, talented mind
that makes absolutes of random, "untransformed" associa
tions, which whether good or bad or ugly, "come forth as the
shaping spirit of Ruin" because they change "as the wind
shifts and shapes the clouds."
A mind so buffeted into submission by the winds of
61
change is inherently selfish, based on contingencies and
lacking in what Coleridge calls "sensibility . . . a compo
nent part of genius . . . excited by any other cause more
27
powerfully than by its own personal interests." It is
the quality of sensibility which allows for a proper balance
between subject and object in the mind; the balance is
proper because it makes the transcending vision more impor
tant than the "personal interests" which desire it because
. . . the man of genius lives most in the ideal
world, in which the present is still constituted by
the future or the past; and because his feelings
have been habitually associated with thoughts and
images, to the number, clearness, and vivacity of
which the sensation of self is always in an inverse
TO
proportion.
Again the "science of pure possibilities . . .must every
where precede the science of real facts." To "live" in the
ideal world and its associations is, like the phenomenolo-
gist, to make the initial step of investigating conscious
ness a transcendental one in which one must choose first to
imagine infinite possibilities before one tries to explore
the more immediate and concrete "sensation of self." The
visionary reality (a referent for the absolute and mysteri
ous source of Being) is apparent to human consciousness by
our "feelings [which] have been habitually associated with
thoughts and images, to the number and clearness and
70
vivacity of which the sensation of self is always in an
inverse proportion." Objective insight is possible, but
thoughts and images, which communicate such insight, have
strength of number and clearness and vivacity only insofar
as we direct our feelings out from our sense awareness
(feelings associated with the individual "I"; bur desires
and self-awareness based on the information and satisfaction
of our senses; Descartes' "I think therefore I am") to uni
versal objects (feelings associated with the external
"I AM": our needs and self-awareness based on yearnings for
that "time beyond us yet ourselves": Plato's cave in which
we come to seek the reality behind the shadows of our
senses).
Later in the Biographia Coleridge says that we must
in effect will this sensibility (establish priorities for
our feelings) or like Descartes we shall have purified the
mind to no purpose. Interestingly, "this purification of
the mind is affected by an absolute and scientific skepti
cism to which the mind voluntarily determines itself for the
29
specific purpose of future certainty," a phenomenological
process which begins at the point of infinite possibilities,
proceeds to a method of reduction (purification) that makes
essence apparent and capable of expression via image and
71
thoughts, and results in a model for the authentic origin of
all philosophical investigations. This "source" is Cole
ridge's nemesis, but also his joy and significant contribu
tion to philosophy; it is the content of chapters XII and
XIII where Coleridge tries to show that the origin of
thought must begin with a proper and useful identification
between objective and subjective reality. "To demonstrate
this identity," he says, "is the office and object of his
30
philosophy." The demonstration, however, is difficult
because there is a frustrating shortage of terminology, a
situation Coleridge hopes to resolve by a language of the
imaginative/intuitive functions of the mind; and the source
31
of this "language in a new key" is a special sort of
idealism:
Now the apparent contradiction . . . namely the exist
ence of things without us, which from its nature
cannot be immediately certain, should be received
as blindly and as independently of all grounds as the
existence of our own being, the transcendental philos
opher can solve only by the supposition that the
former is unconsciously involved in the latter; that
it is not only coherent but identical, and one and
the same thing with our own immediate self-conscious
ness . . . if it be said that this is idealism, let
it be remembered that it is only as for idealism as
it is at the same time and on that very account,
3 2
the truest and most binding realism.
Literally the connection between subject and object
is an "unconscious" one where, by some internal transforming
72
process, the objects of perception become "not only coherent
but identical, and one and the same thing with our own
immediate self-consciousness." Coleridge, like his man of
absolute genius, wills sensibility and steps into his own
looking glass— a mysterious dimension to consciousness
(i.e., unconscious) where perceiver and perceived become one
(i.e., the associations surrounding both subject and object
are referred to the esemplastic power of imagination) and
where the experience, because it is in the looking glass,
remains inarticulate as the "sense" or intuition of the
transcendental philosopher/poet. His mission is to articu
late that intuition, to step out of the looking glass, back
into the conscious world of words and categories. What was
a "still unravished bride of quietness," a vision of cosmic
unity, becomes in the act of language a far-reaching para
dox in which an unconscious faculty (imagination) is said to
be "coherent" and in which "idealism is at the same time and
on that very account, the truest and most binding realism."
Language unfortunately does not fully convey the
"coherency" of what we come to understand through the
faculty of imagination and yet Coleridge says that "It is
the essential mark of the true philosopher to rest satisfied
with no imperfect light, as long as the possibility of
73
34
attaining a fuller knowledge has not been demonstrated."
That "fuller knowledge" which makes of "idealism . . . the
truest and- most binding realism," is based on what Coleridge
calls a postulate pro-tempore:
That the common consciousness itself will furnish
proof by its own direction that it is connected with
Master currents below the surface . . . which cannot
be intelligible to all, even of the most learned and
cultivated classes. A system the first principle of
which is to render the mind intuitive of the spiritu
al in man (i.e., of that which lies on the other side
of our natural consciousness), must needs have a
great obscurity for those who have never disciplined
and strengthened this ulterior consciousness. It
must in truth be a land of darkness, a perfect Anti-
Goshen, for men to whom the noblest treasures of
their own being are reported only through the imper
fect translation of lifeless and sightless notions.
Perhaps, in great part, through words which are but
the shadows of notions, even as the notional under
standing itself is but the shadowy abstraction of
living and actual truth.^
The first step of an epistemology is an acceptance of that
ulterior consciousness which evokes the "spiritual in man";
men of absolute genius discipline and strengthen the intui
tive faculty (linked to consciousness by the imagination)
before they attempt to express the content of that intui
tion. They internalize before they write. To do otherwise
is to focus the intellect on arbitrary categories, "the
imperfect translation of lifeless and sightless notions,"
described by others but never perceived within themselves.
The notions are "lifeless and sightless," not in and of
.
themselves, but because they have no correlative within the
psyche. The general state of philosophy and poetry is
"sightless" because writers with no consciousness of their
primary spiritual intuition use the derivative means of
language to describe a reality based on categories that are
already derivative and arbitrary themselves. As in Plato's
cave, the natural man is twice removed from the source of
his being where his present agony is reflected in language
because "words are but the shadows of notions, even as the
notional understanding itself is but the shadowy abstraction
of living and actual truth."
No wonder that Coleridge is concerned not so much
with what we learn but with how we learn, for only with a
proper epistemology is it ever possible to derive an accu
rate metaphysic. And in chapter XIII Coleridge uses this
emphasis on how rather than on what we learn to differenti
ate himself skillfully and with respect from the empiricist
world view. "Descartes," he says,
. . . speaking as a naturalist and in imitation of
Archimedes, said, "Give me matter and motion and I
will construct you the universe." We must of course
understand him to have meant, "I will render the
O /r
construction of the universe intelligible
But "to make the universe intelligible" is to risk imposing
arbitrary order and wholeness by connecting and systematiz
75
ing sense data. For Coleridge and the phenomenologists the
fatal assumption in philosophy is to suppose that the empir
ical information we recognize is in any way complete. The
concrete empirical information must always be made intelli
gible by association with the nonverbal intuitive informa
tion of an "ulterior consciousness." The tension between
these two kinds of learning results in the disclosure of
knowledge. The philosopher poet does not create a system
of knowledge; rather he creates an environment of process
in which a metaphysic seems to symbolically disclose itself.
Coleridge explains that it is the transcendental philosopher
(again the man of absolute genius) who is able to experience
the creative tension between the two kinds of learning,
and he therefore becomes the object of what is disclosed;
but he is also the subject who "lives" the disclosure.
Coleridge speaks for the transcendental philosopher, who
says,
Grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the
one which tends to expand infinitely, while the
other strives to apprehend or find itself in this
infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences
with the whole system of their representations to
rise up before you.^7
The philosopher/poet is perpetually on the "razor's
edge" between contrary forces (the real and the ideal, the
empirical and the intuitive) struggling to give adequate
Te
form to the coherency that rests behind all paradox without
jumping into the looking glass where Being is everything and
where expression is as impossible as Nothingness. To stay
just this side of the mirror is to be able to see and tell
the story of what surrounds us, of what the lamp illumines
within the context of our own reflections; such is the
position of Coleridge's man of absolute genius who perceives
3 8
and teaches from this razor-thin "omega point" between
dimensions where the meanings are and where the "world of
intelligences with the whole system of their representations
. . . rise up."
In chapter III of the Biographia Coleridge launches
into what is the first of many attempts to understand the
"persecution" of men of absolute genius (in this case
Wordsworth, Southey, and himself, by association, Coleridge
says). He submits arguments which have become the corner
stone dialogue of contemporary literary criticism, primarily
the issues of the critics as failed creative artist (and
therefore parasite) and of the critic as opiate, a condi
tioner of mass opinion who provides the reading public with
escape from thought much like Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor
heralds church dogma as a means of avoiding the implica-
39
tions of individual freedom. The result of providing a
- . - v . - ' - ' - n ' - v — ' -. I i . ' -I i . r i . n ■ ■ ■ , , — - ■ ■
dogma which attains general acceptance is a great deal of
power and control in the hands of those who have created it;
something Coleridge finds intolerable, because
. . . the critic, . . . the amateurs of literature
collectively, were erected into a municipality of
judges and addressed as the Town! And now finally,
all men being supposed able to read, and all readers
able to judge, the multitudinous public, shaped into
personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits
nominal despot on the throne of criticism. But,
alas I as in other despotisms, it but echoes the
decision of its invisible ministers, whose intellec
tual claims to the guardianship of the muses seem,
for the greater part, analogous to the physical qual
ifications which adopt their oriental brethren for
the superintendence of the harem.^0
Collectively, the critic represents a contrast to
Coleridge's men of genius in chapter II. The critic is a
man of no genius and no sensibility; he has talent and is
capable of the magic of abstraction, but only for the self
ish ends of power and control over the world of knowledge.
He commits the Faustean error of selling his soul, his
potential genius, for the power to judge; and like the
harem superintendent, he not only has a great deal of
stamina without qualitative direction, but he also bumbles
and threatens his way into a position of fame and power by
a sort of perverse survival of the mediocre:
Thus it is said that St. Nepomuc was installed the
guardian of bridges because he had fallen over one
and sunk out of sight. Thus, too, St. Cecilia is
said to have been‘first propitiated by musicians,
78
because, having failed in her own attempts, she had
taken a dislike to the art and all its successful
professors.4- * -
The importance of Coleridge's satire here, as in the well-
known letter from "a friend" in chapter XIII, is that Cole
ridge early in the Biographia (chapters I-III) makes a
strength of his alientation which is both fundamental and
enduring. We become men of genius and sensibility when we
choose (will) to forsake the convenient dogmas that comfort
most men and when, unlike St. Nepomue, we actually build
the bridge to intuition which we guard with imagination
and cross into consciousness. That effort results in the
creative freedom of the human spirit, the essence of abso
lute genius, always aware of the "ascertaining vision" ever
just about to be. Coleridge says,
They and they only can acquire the philosophic imag
ination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who
within themselves can interpret and understand the
symbol that the wings of the air-sylph are forming
within the skin of the caterpillar; these only who
feel in their own spirits the same instinct which
impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room
in its involcrum for antennae yet to come. They know
and feel that the potential works in them, even as
the actual works on them! In short, all the organs
of sense are framed for a correspondent world of
spirit: tho' the latter organs are not developed in
all alike.^
Just as chapter II is not about the "supposed irri
tability of men of genius," but rather about the human
/ y
qualities (absolute genius) necessary for a "natural"
beginning to the creation of a philosophy, so chapter III
is not so much about the persecution from critics or even
about the "principles of criticism" (Coleridge says, refer
ring to part II of the Biographia, that he will "have occa
sion hereafter to deliver my convictions more at large
concerning this state of things and its influences on taste,
43
genius, and morality.", ) as it is about demonstrating that
a radical alternative to despotic thinking is not only
possible and necessary but also flourishes in moments of
insight that make up the history of ideas and particularly
in the romantic consciousness. George Watson, on a note to
his edition of the Biographia, suggests that Coleridge's
praise of Southey is excessive in this chapter: "Coleridge
is evidently trying to restore a balance. His private view
44
of Southey was much less favorable." It is equally pos
sible, however, that Coleridge sees Southey more objective
ly, certainly not as a man of absolute genius, but as a man
45
who possesses "the best gifts of talent and genius."
(still seriously flawed categories according to Coleridge's
definitions in chapter II) and who represents, on a quite
general level, the simple and important distinction of this
chapter: that we must be willing to engage new ideas and
explore them rather than attaching ourselves to a conveni
ent dogma. There is the implication that if Southey can
represent such alternative consciousness, this freedom is
possible for many, if not most, human beings. It is Cole
ridge's way of saying that, for the few men of absolute
genius to do their work, there must be many men of genius
and even talent, like Southey, who understand them, learn
from them, and choose to actualize their human capacity for
reason and feeling.
Chapter IV of the Biographia provides a transition
from Coleridge's efforts to demonstrate the free state of
mind necessary for creative learning and teaching (chapters
I-III) to his efforts to summarize and put in new perspec
tive the basic philosophical issues of associationism
(chapters V-VII), of the dualism of subject and object
(chapters VIII and IX), and of the process of integration
and transformation (chapters X-XIII) which demonstrate the
process by which a proper metaphysical investigation begins
and which anticipate the content of such an investigation.
Coleridge's discussion in chapter IV of the reaction to the
"Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads further defines the state
of mind and intentionality of absolute genius and also
prepares for the abstract philosophical discussion which
81
follows and concludes part I of the Biographia (chapters
V-XIII).
It is the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads which
gives Coleridge a frame of reference for expanding his dis
cussion of polarities (the real and the ideal, the intuitive
and the material, reason and feeling) and for explaining
the creative unity he finds in such seeming opposition
through the transforming act of imagination. The Lyrical
Ballads, according to Coleridge, "turned . . . on the two
cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sym
pathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth
of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty
4 6
by the modifying colours of imagination." And then there
follows the familiar distinction of ordinary life (realism)
juxtaposed to supernatural experience (idealism):
The thought suggested itself . . . that a series of
poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one,
the incidents and agents were to be, in sort at least,
supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to
consist in the interesting of the affections by the
dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally
accompany such situations, supposing them real. And
real in this sense they have been to every human being
who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time
believed himself under supernatural agency. For the
second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordi
nary life; the characters and incidents were to be
such as will be found in every village and its vicin
ity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to
seek after them, or to notice them when they present
themselves.^ ^
. g -2
And finally there is Coleridge's method of dealing with such
distinctions:
The office of philosophical disquisition consists
in just distinction; while it is the privilege of
the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware
that distinction is not division. In order to ob-_
tain adequate notions of any truth, we must intel
lectually separate its distinguishable parts; and
this is the technical process of philosophy. But
having done so, we must then restore them in our
conceptions to the unity in which they actually co
exist; and this is the result of philosophy.^®
For Coleridge, distinctions are made only to give greater
clarity to the underlying idea of cohesion and integration.
It is because such organic wholeness is derived from what
is after all a leap of faith (that there ijs an underlying
unity of all things) that critics like Albert Gerard are
prone to judge Coleridge's world view as a "counterfeit
infinity" genuine only as a symbol of man's psychological
49
need for such belief.
It is that kind of criticism which Coleridge re
sponds to in chapter IV in defense of Wordsworth, but more
than a defense of Wordsworth, it is Coleridge showing what
difficult forces oppose the man of absolute genius and
serve to alienate him from his fellows. As in the case of
Southey in chapter III, the critics are eager to pounce on
innovation and on those rare instances when Wordsworth does
not live up to his own intentions (even when, as in the
W3
case of the Lyrical Ballads, such "justified" criticism
could only apply to 100 lines of the whole!); but in this
chapter Coleridge is more concerned with analyzing the
motives of such critics than with showing their reactionary
habits of mind. In finding these motives, he further
differentiates and defines the freedom and sensibility of
men of absolute genius. The chief motive of despotic
thinking, Coleridge finds, is confusion (perplexity) which
breeds fear and anger:
In all perplexity there is a portion of fear which
predisposes the mind to anger. Not able to deny that
the author possessed both genius and a powerful intel
lect, they felt very positive, but were not quite
certain, that he might not be in the right and they
themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state of mind,
which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the occa
sion of it, and by wondering at the perverseness of
the man who has written a long and argumentative
essay to persuade them that, "Fair is foul, and foul
is fair"; in other words, that they had been all their
lives admiring without judgment, and were now about
to censure without reason. ®
And in a footnote Coleridge goes on to explain that the man
afraid to explore freely the realm of ideas and feelings
suffers greatly and is subject to the irrational survival
tactics of the neurotic:
The man feels as if he were standing on his head,
though he cannot but see that he is truly standing
on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will
of course have a tendency to associate itself with
the person who occasions it; even as persons, who
have been by painful means restored from derangement,
84
are known to feel an involuntary dislike toward
their physician.5^
Coleridge implies that part of an authentic episte-
mology must be a "healthy" psychological state in which
ideas are never a threat, never induce fear, but are always
a doorway through which we walk with courage into their
reasonable and intuitive conclusions; these conclusions are
given understanding and expression through imagination
where,
In energetic minds truth soon changes by domestica
tion (internalization) into power; and from directing
in the discrimination and appraisal of the product
becomes influencive in the production. To admire on
principle is the only way to imitate (to create)
without loss of originality.52
Imagination, however, is a complex, much misinterpreted
faculty that has been linked mistakenly, Coleridge feels,
to fancy. In order for men of absolute genius to realize
fully the transforming effect of imagination, its nature and
function must be far more clearly distinguished. To say, as
Wordsworth does, that it exists as the primary ingredient of
an expanded consciousness which is discernable in poetry is
simply not sufficient. Coleridge, the philosopher, wants to
know how it works and to what promised land it leads. He
says:
85
. . . it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to consider
the influences of fancy and imagination as they are
manifested in poetry, and from the different effects
to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my
object to investigate the seminal principle, and then
from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has
drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their
poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even
the roots, as far as they lift themselves above
ground and are visible to the naked eye of our common
consciousness.^
Having shown, by what is essentially a process of
54
phenomenological reduction, how the man of absolute
genius prepares himself for the freedom of imagination
(first, by remembering in tranquility the spot of time
which is the transcendental intuition and subjecting it to
feelings and then to reason; second by internalizing the
experience of feeling and reason so that perceiver and
perceived become one; third, by willing a selfless sensibil
ity that promotes a consciousness of freedom which in turn
allows for an alternative to the tyranny of a powerful and
comfortable closed mindedness; and finally, by using that
sense of freedom to foster within the self a healthy psy
chology open to and respectful of the world of ideas and
unafraid to submit those ideas to the painful and sublime
experience of imagination where learning is at least pos
sible and where teaching is the natural result), Coleridge
now wants to give substance to what takes place when a man
of absolute genius submits himself to the transforming
(esemplastic) power of imagination. In chapters V-XIII
Coleridge tries to "add the trunk and even the roots" to
this process which marks the evolutionary element in man.
The man of absolute genius is a model that shows us what
qualities we must cultivate to encourage "self-actualiza-
55
tion"; the process by which he experiences what he learns
becomes/ in turn, a model for how to begin the construction
of a metaphysic founded, Coleridge says, "on . . . an
instinct of growth, a certain collective unconscious good
sense working progressively."^
Footnotes
"^Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed.
and intro. George Watson (New York: Dutton, 1965), p. 54.
2 3
Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 34.
4
Edmund Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson
(London: Collier-Macmillan, Ltd., 1931), p. 20.
^Ibid.
6
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 140
7 8
Ibid., p. 81 Ibid., p. 83.
9
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York:
Macmillan, 1947), pp. 86-91; Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy
in a New Key (New York: Mentor Books, published by New
American Library, 1942), pp. 94-127.
“ ^Husserl, Ideas, p. 21.
■^See for example C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams,
Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe (New York: Random House,
1961).
12
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 1.
13
P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (New York: Vin
tage Books, a division of Random House, 1970), pp. 1-6 and
291-301.
14
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 3.
15 , . ,
Ibid.
i6TK.,
Ibid.,
17Ibid., pp. 7-8.
18 , ,
I fox cl« f
19
Ibid., p. 12.
8?Ibid-
21 .
Ibid.,
P-
27 22Ibid.
23 ■ J
Ibid., 17 24Ibid.
Ibid. 26Ibid.
27
Ibid.,
P-
25. 28Ibid.
Ibid.,
P-
147.
30
Ibid.
^Susanne! K. Langer, Mind: An
" 8' B l
26.
148.
ing, Vol. I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 130;
George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum,
1970), pp. ix and x; and Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind
(New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Inc., 1972), p. 75.
32
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 148.
33
John Keats, Selected Poetry, ed. Paul de Man
(New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 252.
34
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 139.
2~*Ibid. 28Ibid., p. 162.
37tK .,
Ibid.
38
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy (New
York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Inc., 1962), p. 20; and
Lewis Carrol, Alice1s Adventures in Wonderland (New York:
New American Library, 1960).
39
Feodor Dostoyevsky, "The Grand Inquisitor," m
The Existential Imagination, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Leo
Hamalien (Greenwich: Fawcett Publications, 1963), p. 55.
40
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 34.
41 42
Ibid. Ibid., p. 139.
43
Ibid., p. 34
44
George Watson in "Introduction" to Coleridge's
Biographia, p. 38.
891
45
Colerxdge, Bxographxa, p. 38.
46Ibid., p. 168. 47Ibid. , p. 169.
48Ibid./ p. 171.
4 9
Albert S. Gerard, Englxsh Romantxc Poetry: Ethos,
Structure and Symbol in Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and
Keats (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968),
pp. 40-64.
50
Colerxdge, Bxographxa, p. 43.
51Ibid. 52Ibid., p. 51.
Ibxd., p. 52.
54Husserl, Ideas, p. 25.
55
Abraham H. Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human
Nature (New York: Viking Press, 1971).
^Coleridge, Biographia, p. 50.
CHAPTER III
CONTENT AND CONTEXT OF COLERIDGE'S
THEORY OF IMAGINATION:
BIOGRAPHIA V-IX,
XII AND XIII
Chapter IV of the Biographia concludes with Cole
ridge's desire to "add the trunk and even the roots . . . to
investigate the seminal principle" that governs the influ
ences of fancy and imagination. That such an investigation
must begin with a "proper" frame of mind is the subject of
the first four chapters. Now Coleridge must add content (a
metaphysic) and a context (a relationship to the history of
ideas) to the epistemology represented by his men of abso
lute genius. The content, Coleridge recognizes, is neces
sarily incomplete because the "roots" of wisdom are by
definition beneath the ground of our senses and not visible
"to the naked eye of our common consciousness," and hence
Coleridge's consistent emphasis on developing "the sacred
power of self-intuition" which "can interpret and understand
the symbol that the wings of the air-sylph are forming
_________________________________SD_________________________________
91
2
within the skin of the caterpillar."
In learning to direct our feelings and our reason to
what is not apparent we are faithful to what Coleridge has
called "the first principle . . . of a system," of a meta
physic, which is "to render the mind intuitive of the
spiritual in man, of that which lies on the other side of
3
our natural consciousness." The content of that "other
side" (what we know intuitively through feeling; in the
"Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads, experiences of the super
natural) is disclosed by the transforming activity of the
imagination which provides a bridge to our "natural con
sciousness" (what we know through sense awareness and rea
son; in the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads, the experi
ences of ordinary life) and gives an enlightened context to
the assumptions of materialists and idealists in the history
of philosophy. In chapters V-XI of the Biographia, Cole
ridge suggests the guidelines for such a context to his
metaphysic, or theory of the imagination in chapters XII and
XIII. Because he seeks to integrate the essence of both
the visible trunk and the invisible roots into his world
view he emerges as a sort of "advance" phenomenologist,
comprehensive about the concrete, committed to the abstract;
and in the Biographia, by abbreviating his own "theory" to
. 92
what Owen Barfield calls a "truncated chapter XIII . . .
praised, criticised, confuted, confirmed, argued from
argued against, expounded, blessed and cursed over and over
4
again," he is faithful to the phenomenologist's concern
with preparing the way for a philosophy to begin rather than
with providing a place for philosophy to end. He chooses
to leave a great deal to the intimations of his reader who
must prove himself worthy of the trust of intuition, under
standing, and open-mindedness under which Coleridge has
placed him.
What Coleridge expects of his reader will be dis
cussed more fully under the subject of his intentionality
which makes up chapter IV of this study, but certainly
Coleridge prepares us for these expectations; they are
already implicit in the qualities that characterize absolute
genius. Coleridge's metaphysic necessitates a reader will
ing and able to speculate with even-mindedness on the spaces
Detween chapters XII and XIII of the Biographia and the
never-completed Constructive Philosophy. As Barfield points
out, Coleridge was surely not idle in pursuing his own spec-
jlations, but the more important observation is that Cole
ridge's theory is so comprehensive, so filled with important
Implications for all disciplines, that it comprises know
93
ledge in its ideal sense, which is to say that it "needs"
and encourages a concrete expression of the collective
intimations that this "truncated" metaphysic inspires:
. . . the Constructive Philosophy . . . was certain
ly never finished; but equally certainly it was more
than merely begun, and there are two substantial MS
volumes in the British Museum, which were undoubtedly
intended to be the first part of it. Moreover it is
apparent from other published works such as Aids to
Reflection, the Friend, the Philosophical Lectures,
and the Theory of Life, and it has been becoming
more and more apparent during the last few decades
from MSS, letters, marginalia, notebook entries, etc.,
that the substance of his projected Magnum Opus was
fully available to Coleridge's mind before he died,
in the shape of a coherent and closely knit psychol
ogy t philosophy, and cosmology. . . . Apart from all
this, there is chapter XII . . . which, though it is
difficult reading, is perfectly intelligible, and
from which, even if taken by itself, the skeleton of
the constructive, or dynamic, philosophy, and in
particular the precise significance of the term pri
mary imagination, can be constructed by a little
serious application.^
What Barfield calls the "skeleton of a constructive, or
dynamic, philosophy" is Husserl's "one philosophy which in
idea underlies all the philosophies that can be imagined,"
a model for relative paths of learning within the context of
a reality governed by absolutes.
At the very beginning of chapter XIII, Coleridge
identifies the absolutes: "two contrary forces, the one of
which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives
to apprehend or find itself in this infinity,"^ and he also
determines that the way in which these forces may be "under
stood" is to observe them as a state of being, of abstract
process pointing to no certain categories of thought or
feeling. "Every other science," Coleridge says, "presup
poses intelligence as already existing and complete: the
philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were
represents its history to the mind from its birth to its
7
maturxty." Every human being is unique in his activity as
perceiver, in his contemplation of the process of intelli
gence. Through unique patterns (associations) of thoughts *
and feelings we experience in different ways (i.e., through
relative paths of learning) the wholeness of infinite expan
sion and the fragmentation of striving to apprehend or
define ourselves in this infinity. Further, there appears
to be a reciprocal relationship between the mind or psyche
of the philosopher and the intelligence or ding an sich
apart from it.
For Coleridge the objective thing in itself, though
identifiable as a cosmic process of two contrary forces
separate from human consciousness, cannot be said really
to exist unless the philosopher completes it by the act of
perception, by seeing "it" as an object of intuitive con
templation (Coleridge says, "With me the act of contempla-
O
tion makes the thing contemplated" ) and thereby givxng
95
it "growth" and representing "its history to the mind from
its birth to its maturity." Coleridge implies that in
contemplation the trained mind/psyche of the transcendental
philosopher, the man of absolute genius, gives "life" to
the cosmic reality (to whatever absolute is integral to the
two forces which Coleridge calls "this one power with its
9
two inherent indestructible yet counteracting forces"),
and in turn this ding an sich discloses itself through the
paradox of absolute infinity (intelligence) and infinite
relativity (how that intelligence is perceived) to the
transcendental philosopher who will "represent," that is
express imperfectly, by thoughts and feelings, symbols and
images, the experience and knowledge of that disclosure, or
as Coleridge says, "cause the world of intelligences with
the whole system of their representations to rise up before
,.10
you.
The two forces of one power, in their interaction
with the effect and result of a phenomenology of human per
ception, comprise the content of Coleridge's metaphysic for
which he provides the foundation, the "skeleton," in chap
ter XIII:
Now the transcendental philosophy demands: first,
that two forces should be conceived which counteract
each other by their essential nature, not only in
consequence of the accidental direction of each, but
9 T 6 ]
as prior to all direction, may, as the primary forces
from which the conditions of all possible directions
are derivative and deducible; secondly that these
forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite,
both alike indestructible. The problem will then
be to discover the result or product of two such
forces, as distinguished from the result of those
forces, which are finite, and derive their difference
solely from the circumstance of their direction.
When we have formed a scheme or outline of these
two different kinds of force and of their different
results by the process of discursive reasoning, it
will then remain for us to elevate the Thesis from
notional to actual by contemplating intuitively this
one power with its two inherent yet counteracting
forces, and the results or generations to which
their interpenetration gives existence in the living
principle and in the process of our own self-con
sciousness. By what instrument this is possible the
solution itself will discover, and at the same time
• 1 1
that it will reveal to and for whom it is possible. x
In this most important passage, Coleridge states his assump
tions and he suggests a structure from which the "serious"
reader may draw legitimate implications, for "there is a
philosophic, no less than a poetic genius, which is differ
enced from the highest perfection . . . not by degree but
1 O
by kind." The first assumption marks the existence of an
objective reality quite apart from human consciousness
(what Coleridge first calls "intelligence"). And, secondly,
Coleridge assumes that this intelligence "should be con
ceived," that is created, by an act of will, in human
consciousness as "two forces . . . which counteract each
other by their essential nature." Coleridge implies that
57
if we choose to observe in our perceptions the wide range
and infinite degrees between dualities, we come to intuit
the "essential nature" behind them and the relative paths
of learning most "constructive" for us. Coleridge's goal
for every man is a "constructive philosophy," a guiding
"idea" through which we each intuit absolute intelligence,
"the primary forces . . . prior to all direction," and
through which we simultaneously know the infinite variety,
the duality, paradox, and relativity by which this absolute
intelligence imprints itself on our individual acts of per
ception. Not only does the mind/psyche intuit (by feel
ing) "one power" behind the two all-inclusive forces it
conceives, it also identifies (by reason and thoughts) the
actual, completely subjective experiences drawn from these
primary forces "from which the conditions of all possible
directions are derivative and deducible." The subjective
mind and its objects are not split but interwoven in tapes
tries which Yeats called the "cloths of heaven"; like our
dreams they are the fabric of another dimension, and we
18
must touch (interpret) them to realize those dreams.
Coleridge's third assumption then follows: this co
existence of subject and object is not simply descriptive of
how the mind works; rather, the activity of the mind is
98
purposeful; it evokes the evolutionary capacity in man and
gives him meaning because "the results or generations" of
its activity, of its process of learning and knowing,
"gives existence in the living principle and in the process
of our own self consciousness." In other words, the mind
functions as a generator of energy for itself and for things
beyond its own limitations; it "gives existence" to both
"the living principle," the absolute, objective intelli
gence, and to "the process of our own self consciousness,"
the relative, subjective experiencing of that "living
principle" within "all possible directions"; that is, in all
the possible categories of reason and feeling which "are
derivative and deducible" from the generative, creative
activity of the psyche.
Coleridge's philosophy is transcendental because he
assumes that in all of our experiences of perception "we
14
play a tune beyond us yet ourselves." The mxnd, though
in one sense limited to its own categories of "discursive
reasoning" (which results in the assumption of the two
forces of one power), may transcend those categories by
elevating "the Thesis from notional to actual by contemplat
ing intuitively this one power with its two inherent inde
structible yet counteracting forces." It is by directing
99
mental energy, "intuitive contemplation," to the result of
feeling and discursive reason that human evolution takes
place, that abstract "notions" become actualized in our
experience of the "interpenetration" of two forces of one
power in the mind which "gives existence" to "the living
principle" and to "the process of our own self-conscious
ness." We are transformed when we know for a moment (in a
spot of time) that everything beyond us (object) and
everything within us (subject) is generated by a meeting
and "interpenetration" of two primordial forces in the
psyche of every human being. Coleridge's final major
assumption in this outline is that something, an "instru
ment," makes possible this life-giving encounter between
subject and object. "By what instrument this is possible,"
Coleridge says, "the solution itself will discover, at the
same time that it will reveal to and for whom it is pos-
15
sible." The instrument is the imagination; the solution
is Coleridge's theory of it.
Like the philosophical assumptions that precede it,
Coleridge's theory of imagination is also given only in
outline form. This outline, provided in the well-known
listinctions among primary imagination, secondary imagina
tion, and fancy that conclude chapter XIII, suggests a kind
nro
of psychological correlative to Coleridge’s apparent inten
tions in philosophy, specifically that there is a factor of
consciousness which makes thinking "constructive." That
factor of purpose and meaning is set in motion when a man
of absolute genius achieves epistemological understanding
(chapter II of this study) and internalizes his perceptions
and their objects and, as a result, becomes conscious of
absolute objectivity (substance) and infinite relativity
(the ever-varying form of substance). By intuitively con
templating the two forces of one power, we allow the
instrument of imagination to disclose the entire spectrum
of human thought and feeling, not just to our "notional"
understanding but also to our "actual" experience. When
we imagine, we actualize, i.e., live psychologically, the
primary "living principle" interpenetrated into all of the
secondary degrees by which we experience it. What Coleridge
submits as his theory of the imagination is an "underlying
idea" that incorporates primary, secondary, and associative
ingredients (forces) which vie for integration and trans
formation in a human consciousness committed to a trans
cendental metaphysic:
The imagination then I consider either as pri
mary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold
to be the living power and prime agent of all human
perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind
101
of the ; sternal act of creation in the infinite I
AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the for
mer, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still
as identical with the primary in the kind of its
agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode
of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates
in order to re-create; or where this process is
rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it
struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essen
tially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are
essentially fixed and dead.
Fancy on the contrary, has no other counters to
play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is
indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated
from the order of time and space; and blended with
and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the
will which we express by the word choice. But
equally with the ordinary memory it must receive
all its materials ready made from the law of asso-
-I ■ *
ciation.
More important than all other considerations in
Coleridge's theory of the imagination is that apparently the
totality of imagination is a qualitative force that links a
transcendental conceptual understanding to the psychologi
cal realities by which we experience what we understand.
Imagination gives value to the content of philosophy by
associating (transforming) such content with all its psycho
logical forms of experience. Probably only the man of
absolute genius, who has opened the door to an evolving
ivisdom by serious epistemological preparation, "understands"
enough "content" to make the parallel psychological forms of
experience "constructive." Coleridge spends a great deal of
time in chapter XII trying to endow a transcendental philos
ophy with a content sufficient to foreshadow all the ideas
that can be imagined. Such a philosophy, based on the
theoretical assumptions of chapters XII and XIII, is given
life in the man of absolute genius as he becomes conscious
of experiencing within his own psyche all the psychological
correlatives associated with "the one philosophy which in
idea underlies all the philosophies that can be imagined."
Imagination is literally the "living Power" which energizes
ideas and "recreates" them as the whole range of psycholog
ical responses possible for human beings.
The primary imagination deals with psychological
responses of faith and skepticism association with objec
tive ideas, what Coleridge calls "the infinite I AM"; that
which exists apart from human consciousness as the unknown,
the causative, or the first principle of creation. For
Coleridge the primary imagination exists as the correlative
of "God" in man; it is a "repetition in the finite mind of
the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM." The
assumption is that there is an element in man which is a
microcosm of whatever universal causative principle exists
outside of him. Our perceptions are therefore linked, in
terms of how they function and to what they refer, to
103
universal objects, which we can never know directly. The
primary imagination really is "the living power and prime
agent of human perception" because the "infinite I AM"
already includes the totality of the collective human psy
che, both how it functions and what it perceives. The
primary imagination is the element by which we know meaning
and purpose intuitively. The world is given order and
understanding by both faith and reason; whether we adapt a
"faith" in skepticism (Sartre, for example) or in teleo-
logical structure (Aquinas and Paul Tillich, for example)
our world view is rational, one that has meaning because it
makes sense.
The secondary imagination deals with psychological
responses of fear and trembling, of the anguish and search
ing associated with subjective ideas, what Coleridge calls
the "struggle to idealize and to unify" apart from the
intuitive certainty (knowledge, understanding) of meaning
and order. For Coleridge the secondary imagination exists
as the correlative in man of the absence of "God"; it is an
"echo" of the primary imagination, hollow and empty of the
meaning which a part of our psyche always incorporates and
understands. But the secondary imagination is no less
important simply because it does not "know"; it in fact
104
functions as the source of intuitive wisdom from which it
is experientially separated. It is therefore "identical
with the primary in the kind of its agency" and differs
"only in degree and in the mode of its operation." The
difference in "degree" is that the secondary imagination
makes conscious the internal effects of a quest still separ
ated from its Holy Grail/ whereas the primary imagination
brings to consciousness the certainty that the quest of
self-knowledge, the existence and ultimate discovery of the
Grail, is the only path to growth and evolution. The "mode
of its operation" is to engender within us the "feelings"
of what Sartre would call the anguish, abandonment, and
despair of living in the world; anguish because we perceive
that every human being is enclosed in the creations of his
own psyche where the painful thing is to realize the ter-i
rible burden implied by the freedom of such complete sub
jectivity; abandonment because without intuitive objective
knowledge, we are abandoned by the gods to which we would
look for meaning, comfort, control, and order; despair
because we finally accept the apparent fact that there is
"no exit" from the human condition. We must do the best we
can with what we have. Coleridge's "mode" of the secondary
imagination gives vitality to this insight of twentieth
105
century philosophy that the experience of the absence of
absolutes is somehow all important.
Coleridge's significant contribution, however, is
that he did not take a leap of faith into either an objec
tive or subjective (primary or secondary) reality. Instead,
like the phenomenologist he was, he took a leap into both
realities, saying in effect that no portion of our thoughts
and feelings, of our intuitions and more immediate empirical
sensations could be denied. If the primary imagination is
our correlative for meaning and order, the secondary imagi
nation "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates" that meaning and
that purpose "in order to re-create" the image and reality
of the gods, of meaning in ever new more "constructive"
ways within us. The assumption is that we must experience
the diffusion, the anguish, in order to come closer to the
intuitive wisdom ever present and ever just out of reach.
Because the secondary imagination is the correlative of the
search for meaning, it is "essentially vital"; that is, it
lives and breathes and feels the process of the search.
Because that part of us which is the primary imagination
already knows "God," it is satisfied with contemplation,
with the experience of "oneness," and because there is no
struggle "it is essentially fixed and dead."
106
What Coleridge calls "fancy" is that which remains
to be integrated into the individual search for meaning; it
is therefore "contrary" to what we experience through the
secondary imagination because it is "no more than a mode
of memory emancipated from the order of space and time."
In other words, fancy, unlike the secondary imagination
which is but the other side of "God," is cut off altogether
from the "order" of intuitive "space" and "time" which
characterizes the transcendental understanding of the pri
mary imagination. Coleridge's reference to "emancipation"
is ironic because to be "freed" from any connection to "the
order of time and space" is to have tunnel vision, to have
"no other counter to play with but fixities and definites"
and to be imprisoned in a "mode of memory" completely separ
ated from the primary and secondary processes of conscious
ness by which we grow and evolve and come to "understand."
To be rooted in fancy is to possess no faculty for integrat
ing the thoughts and feelings we have; in the realm of fancy
those thoughts and feelings become prejudices: the products
of conditioning that demand "fixities and definites" in
order to be comfortable. To accept the dual reality of
Coleridge's leap into both primary objectivity and secondary
subjectivity is to initiate a creative tension which most
107
human beings only too gladly avoid. Most of us, Coleridge
suggests, filter our consciousness through the faculty of
\
fancy and we become "fixed" and closed minded because we
pay attention only to what we remember from empirical
experience, and for the sake of an arbitrary order we string
those memories together by convenient "materials ready made
from the law of association." As early as chapter II of
the Biographia, Coleridge contrasts his men of absolute
genius who can tolerate and sustain the "creative, self-
sufficing power . . . of imagination" in its "ever-varying
form" to those who demand the stability of impressing "their
preconceptions on the world without in order to present them
back to their own view with a satisfying degree of clear-
17
ness, distinctness, and individuality."
Interestingly, for Coleridge, the result of this
blending of a "mode of memory," which is the desire for
order, and that "empirical phenomenon of the will," which
is the fear of chaos and a mistaken assertion of individu
ality, is the illusion of "choice" or free will which really
is inauthentic because it comes from a process of thinking
and feeling "emancipated from the order of time and space,"
freed from both primary, absolute meaning and the secondary,
relative quests for it. Such "freedom" is indeed "fancy"
. rog
and has no context or content other than its own immediate
empirical associations? indeed as Coleridge says (again,
early in the Biographia, chapter IV), "fancy and imagination
are two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of
being according to the general belief, either two names
with one meaning, or at furthest the lower and higher degree
18
of the same power." Fancy is "distinct and widely differ
ent" from imagination because it represents that functional,
often talented portion of the psyche completely cut off
from its evolutionary and transcendental nature.
In his outline of a theory of imagination that
gives equal value to the psychological experience of both
objective and subjective reality, Coleridge anticipates one
of the most intriguing aspects of the whole genre of phe
nomenological philosophers: their concern for providing
not the content of a metaphysic but a model of thinking or
feeling (what M. Ponty calls the "phenomenology of percep
tion") by which it becomes possible for the individual to
arrive at his own ways of expressing essence and thereby to
create an authentic, but by definition, incomplete (i.e.,
19
relative) metaphysic. For Coleridge and those he both
influenced and anticipated (specifically Husserl and
20
Ponty) two basic assumptions are consistently interwoven
. _
into the fabric of whatever system the individual philoso
pher adopts or creates: first, that man and his talents are
linked in some quite mysterious way to the source of Being
(in chapter I, the "style" of phenomenological concern),
and second, that man experiences almost infinite relativity
in both recognizing and experiencing this link (in chapter
I, the "method" of phenomenology). As already discussed in
chapter II of this study, Coleridge in the first four chap
ters of the Biographia squares this metaphysical circle by
simply reversing the usual order of rational thought, where
in the words of Husserl, "the science of pure possibilities,
O *1
must everywhere precede the science of real facts." Also
in the first four chapters of the Biographia, Coleridge has
suggested that it is the sequence of perception that is
srucial, and for the phenomenologist the first step is al
ways the transcendental one. The philosopher, on both a
psychological and metaphysical level, must always choose
Pirst to imagine infinite possibilities before he seeks
resolution in finite (concrete) feelings and thoughts. The
science of pure possibilities gives the science of real
22
Pacts "the guidance of its . . . logic." To reverse the
procedure (the common practice of both the materialist/
empiricist and the idealist/rationalist) is to fall into
m 3
the trap of arbitrarily limiting what and how it is possible
to perceive before allowing the transcendent faculty of
imagination access to the exploration of objective and
subjective (external and internal) possibilities.
This faculty of imagination is transcendent in the
sense of "inclusive" because Coleridge assumes the simul
taneous experience of primary (absolute, objective) and
secondary (relative, subjective) factors in the mind. The
man of absolute genius, committed to understanding and
evolving, experiences order and chaos, meanings or the lack
of them, always within context of one another. The oppo
site forces generated by contrasting philosophical theories
and their counterparts of psychological experience are not
so much reconciled as in perpetual dynamic and contingent
relationship to one another. The man of absolute genius
lives in an "intermundium . . . between thought and reality
. . . in which his own living spirit supplies the substance,
23
and his imagination the ever varying form." Coleridge,
by taking all of his mental processes seriously (his empiri
cal observations, his associations, his intuitions, his
reason and his feeling, and finally the transforming power
of his imagination), gives due credit to the context of a
history of ideas while at the same time he transcends the
___ ^
dualistic categories of philosophical theory which are in
equal measure limited but also in equal measure the founda
tion of his projected "Constructive Philosophy"; or to put
it another way, "constructive" philosophers teach the
transformation of fancy into "philosophic imagination, the
sacred power of self intuition" where "they know and feel
that the potential works in them, even as the actual works
on them."^ The result of such transformation is the
enlightenment and understanding finally achieved by the
ancient mariner.
Before Coleridge posits the potential "enlighten
ment" of imagination, represented theoretically in chapters
XII and XIII of the Biographia and represented experien-
tially in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he evaluates the
two categories of philosophical theory. In chapters V-IX
of the Biographia Coleridge prepares for his "inclusive"
theory of an imaginative capacity, which is the touchstone
of evolution in man, by seeking to come to terms with the
opposition between an empirical/materialist/subjectivist
and an ideal/rationalist/objectivist world view. Both
"sides'1 of this classic dualism in philosophy are necessary
Coleridge says; to leap into one side of this dualism
without an "integration" of the other is to create an
112
illusory world of "fancy" and to deny a significant portion
of the nature of our humanity.
In chapters V-VII, Coleridge discusses the law of
association and its relationship to an empirical philosophy.
Hartley, Hobbes, and Hume, Coleridge says in chapter V, are
arbitrary, dogmatic, and mechanistic. They have no interest
in the intuitive sense "which evokes the spiritual in man;
they are, however, most interested in classifying and
describing a "law of association" which establishes "the
contemporaneity of the original impressions" and forms
25
"the basis of all true psychology." For Hobbes, in par
ticular, Coleridge says, "Any ontological or metaphysical
science not consistent with such empirical psychology is
o c
but a web of abstractions and generalizations." Obvi
ously Coleridge values the importance of "men in all ages
who have been impelled as by an instinct to propose their
27
own nature as a problem" and he seeks to give structure
to the "original impressions" by which we shape our world
and are shaped by it. For Coleridge, however, just to
describe the structure by which a certain pattern of associ
ation takes place and mechanistically to anticipate the
psychological results of such a pattern is to ignore the
wider ranges of meaning possible for man. "Hobbes,"
113
Coleridge says, "builds nothing on the principle which he
2 8
had announced."
Coleridge then turns to Descartes and Aristotle
for a more inclusive, and therefore more valuable, state
ment of a subjectivist philosophy. Descartes, like Cole
ridge himself, often employed a biographical method "which
first led him to meditate on this subject" (the law of
association) and which since then has ofteen been noticed
29
and employed as an instance and illustration of the law.
For Coleridge it is essential that philosophy be derived
from learning experiences, from what Minkowski would call
30
"lived time," rather than from the arbitrary mental cate
gories created by a Hume or a Hobbes. Because Descartes
attempted to integrate his ideas on the law of association
with actual autobiographical experience, Coleridge respects
his "reflections on the uncertainty with which we attribute
any particular place to any inward pain or uneasiness . . .
as a general law that contemporaneous impressions, whether
31
images or sensations, recall each other mechanically."
The associations of autobiographical experience (Descartes'
"I think") become the totality of our being in the world
(Descartes' "I think therefore I am"). Though such auto
biographical associations are vital for Coleridge, as he
114
says in chapter I of the Biographia, they do not constitute
the totality of our being. Descartes limits himself to the
suppositions of one hypothesis which, for Coleridge, is
always an unnecessarily restrictive philosophical attitude,
no matter whether the assumptions are empirical or ideal.
For the best spokesman of subjectivist ideas, Coleridge
ultimately turns to Aristotle who "delivers a just theory
without pretending to an hypothesis: or in other words a
comprehensive survey of the different facts, and of their
32
relations to each other without supposition."
For Coleridge the virtue of Aristotle's empirical
system of thought is his consciousness of separating (what
the phenomenologist would call bracketing) suppositions
from "a comprehensive survey of the different facts, and of
their relations to each other without supposition." Aris
totle chooses to direct his energy fully to investigating
empirical "facts," but he does not assume that these "facts"
encompass the totality (the "infinite I AM") of human
nature. Because Aristotle is conscious of a separate but
equal world of suppositions that constitute a creative
opposition to his empirical observations, Coleridge accepts
Aristotle as a reliable and "constructive" spokesman for a
subjective consciousness based on "the general law of
115
association or, more accurately, the common condition under
which all existing causes act and in which they may be
33
generalized." And Coleridge m chapter V of the Bio
graphia goes on to summarize Aristotle's description of
such a subjective consciousness:
Ideas by having been together acquire a power of
recalling each other; or every partial representation
awakes the total representation of which it had been
a part. In the practical determination of this com
mon principle to particular recollections he admits
five agents or occasioning causes: 1st, connection
in time, whether simultaneous, preceding or succes
sive; 2nd, vicinity or connection in space; 3rd,
interdependence or necessary connection, as cause
and effect; 4th, likeness; and 5th, contrast, as an
additional solution of the occasional seeming chasms
in the continuity of reproduction (perception) he
proves that movements or ideas possessing one or the
other of these five characters had passed through
the mind as intermediate links, sufficiently clear
to recall other parts of the same total impressions
with which they had co-existed, though not vivid
enough to excite that degree of attention which is
requisite for distinct recollection, or as we may
aptly express it, after consciousness.^
This "after consciousness" is "the universal law of
3 5
the passive fancy and mechanical memory" and includes the
memories (associations) of subjective experiences plus the
fancy (the arbitrary suppositions) by which we impose order
on our subjective experiences, thus supplying "to all
other faculties their objects, to all thought the elements
O f .
of its materials." Coleridge concludes chapter V of the
Biographia by promising "to shew by what influences of the
m
choice and judgement the associative power becomes either
memory or fancy; and, in conclusion, to appropriate the
remaining offices of the mind to the reason and the imagi-
37
nation." Interestingly, in that brief statement of his
intentions, Coleridge prepares his reader for the unique
triangle of thought that outlines his metaphysic. First,
there is the subjectivist axis that manifests as the
associations of linear memory or the suppositions of fancy;
second, there is the objectivist axis that manifests as
speculative reason and/or belief; finally, there is the
axis of imagination that transforms memory and fancy, reason
and belief into phenomenological perception and transcen
dental understanding. All three axes represent "offices of
the mind," which Coleridge says are contingent on one
another and cannot function authentically in isolation.
In chapter VI of the Biographia, Coleridge goes on
to explore the character of subjective thought by comparing
Hartley's approach to that of Aristotle. Coleridge con
cludes that Hartley "differed only to err" because, like
3 8
Hobbes, he fell victim to "a mere delusion of the fancy"
which took the form of the comfortable and orderly assump
tion that the mechanics of association constitute all that
can or need be known of human nature. Coleridge explains:
TT7I
For all other parts of Hartley's system as far as
they are peculiar to that system, once removed from
their mechanical basis not only lose their main sup
port but the very motive which led to their adoption.
Thus the principle of contemporaneity, which Aris
totle had made the common condition of all the laws
of association, Hartley was constrained to represent
as being itself the sole law . . . the will, the
reason, the judgement and the understanding, instead
of being the determining causes of association, must
needs be represented as its creatures, and among its
mechanical effects.^9
To give up the acceptance of will, reason, judgment, and
the understanding as the caused forces, both internal and
external, that energize the laws of association is, Cole
ridge says in chapter VII of the Biographia, to have no
soul:
The soul becomes a mere ens logicum; for as a real
separable being, it would be more worthless and
ludicrous than the grimalkins in the cat harpsichord
described in the Spectator (#361-24 April 1712).
For these did form a part of the process; but in
Hartley's scheme the soul is present only to be
pinched or stroked, while the very squeals or
purring are produced by an agency wholy independ
ent and alien.
And to deny the microcosm of the soul is to deny the exist
ence of the macrocosm of infinite spirit itself:
The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intel
ligent and holy will, must on this mechanical
system be mere articulated motions of the air.
For as the function of the human understanding is
no other than merely, to appear to itself, to
combine and to apply the phaenomena of the associ
ation; and as these derive all their reality from
the sensations again all their reality from the
impressions at extra; a God not visible, audible
rrg
or tangible can exist only in the sounds and letters
that form his name and atrributes.
Such arguments, Coleridge says, simply deny the relevance
of what does not fit into the "fancy" of empirical observa
tion because they
. . . may all be reduced to one sophism as their
common genus: the mistaking the conditions of a
thing for its causes and essence; and the process
by which we arrive at the knowledge of a faculty,
for the faculty itself. The air I breathe is the
condition of my life, not its cause. We could
never have learnt that we had eyes but by the
process of seeing; yet having seen we know that the
eyes must have pre-existed in order to render the
process of sight possible.
And such thinking, "such men," Coleridge suggests, "need
discipline, not argument; they must be made better men
before they can become wiser.
Chapter VII of the Biographia concludes with
Coleridge's statement of the proper, "constructive" use of
empirical philosophy as expressed in the laws of associa
tion. If the goal of philosophy, whatever the system, is
to become better and wiser, then no system can afford the
"fancy" of tunnel vision. Like Aristotle, Coleridge
concludes that the philosopher can direct his consciousness
toward the exploration of either objective or subjective
systems of thought, but he cannot and does not eliminate the
relevance and contingency of the other side of the dualism
119
by the choice which he makes. In fact, an authentic empir
ical awareness will observe contemporaneously both passive
associations of the mind and the active causal principles
from which the associations derive their being. If "fancy"
does not intrude on our subjective awareness, we must
acknowledge the dualism inherent in all of our efforts at
consciousness. Coleridge uses the following analogy to show
the empirical necessity of accepting the opposite forces
through which we think and have our being:
Most of my readers will have observed a small water-
insect on the surface of rivulets which throws a
conque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours
on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have
noticed how the little animal wins its way up
against the stream by alternate pulses of active
and passive motion, now resisting the current, and
now yielding to it in order to gather strength and
a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This
is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in
the act of thinking. There are evidently two pow
ers at work which relatively to each other are ac
tive and passive; and this is not possible without
an intermediate faculty which is at once both
active and passive. In philosophical language we
must denominate this intermediate faculty in all
its degrees and determinations the imagination.^
For Coleridge the subjectivist point of view is
important because it emphasizes "the self experience in the
act of thinking" of the mind. But Coleridge insists that
these internal processes of perception are always in coun
terpoint to external processes of projection which emerge
r7D
as the factors of human will, judgment, and understanding.
When these factors of will, judgment and understanding—
what Coleridge calls "intelligence" in chapter VI of the
Biographia— are integrated with an open-minded recognition
and organizing of empirical associations, then transcen
dental insight becomes possible
. . . if the intelligent faculty should be rendered
more comprehensive, it would require only a differ
ent and apportioned organization, the body celestial
instead of the body terrestrial, to bring before .
every human soul the collective experience of its
whole past existence. And this, this perchance, is
the dread book of judgement in whose mysterious
hieroglyphics every idle word is recorded.^
An "intelligent faculty . . . rendered more comprehensive"
and with "a different and apportioned organization" suggests
the "intermediate faculty of imagination" which, in its com
prehensive inclusiveness of all activities of the psyche,
raises the body terrestrial to the body celestial from which
we may derive transcendental understanding; subjective
insight is "constructive" when it mirrors objective reali
ties which result in understanding and "bring before every
human soul the collective experience of its whole past
existence." In seeing the collective totality of himself
nan (subject) begins to transcend that self and to decipher
4 6
and demythologize the "hieroglyphics" of God (object).
In chapters VIII and IX of the Biographia,
m
Coleridge tries to isolate and explain more clearly the
contribution of the objectivist philosophical position.
First, in chapter VIII he restates the contribution of
Descartes in recognizing the dualism in the first place, but
he also emphasizes again that neither system in isolation or
"any possible theory of association, supplies or supersedes
a theory of perception or explains the formation of the
associable."^ And in chapter IX Coleridge begins with a
summary statement of his argument: "We learn all things
indeed by occasion of experience; but the very facts so
learnt force us inward on the antecedents, that must be
presupposed in order to render experience itself pos-
48
sible." For Coleridge subjective insight thus must lead
invariably toward the recognition and acceptance of external
objects that often have a variety of subjective effects.
Indealist/objective philosophy provided Coleridge with a
language of reason and intuition for describing "the ante
cedents that must be presupposed in order to render experi
ence itself possible."
First, Coleridge acknowledges a debt of gratitude to
the mystics, particularly to Jacob Behmen and George Fox.
The writings of these mystics prevented Coleridge from
falling into the comfortable traps of "fancy" (whether
1 2 7
empirical or ideal) and "acted in no slight degree to
prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the outline
of any single dogmatic system." The insight of the mystics
gave to..Coleridge a supporting sense of the reality of the
transcendental within man, a reality entered into not by
4 9
"the mere reflective faculty," but by the conscious
5 0
choice "to keep alive the heart in the head." And Cole
ridge, with all of his reverence for feeling and intuition,
was equally devoted to applying the faculty of reason to
an idealist philosophy. He therefore acknowledges a very
important debt to the Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
By reading Kant, Coleridge says, he became convinced that
intuitive insight and rational understanding are compatible
faculties for exploring the realms of idealist philosophy.
Kant's Ding an Sich becomes a symbol of the outer limits of
reason, a touchstone in the mind where man encounters the
objects he perceives, where "an idea, in the highest sense
of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol; and . . .
all symbols of necessity involve an apparent contradic-
51
tion." A "constructive" objectivist philosophy also
incorporates its opposite by suggesting a rational objective
52
symbol which rests in the silence beyond language where
the intermediate faculty of imagination can evoke
integration, transformation, and the possibility of evolu
tion in the mind of one who is willing to read beyond the .
language of the symbol. Thus Coleridge can say convincingly
of Kant and of himself, "In spite of his own declarations,
I could never believe it was possible for him to have meant
no more by his . . . Thing in Itself than his mere words
express."^
If empiricism, adopted in isolation, can in Cole-
54
ridge's words function as a "despotism of the eye"; then
idealism, adopted in isolation, can function as a despotism
of the word. In the face of this dualism, Coleridge says:
We are restless because invisible things are not
the objects of vision; and metaphysical systems
for the most part, become popular not for their
truth, but in proportion as they attribute to
causes a susceptibility of being seen, if only our
visual organs were sufficiently powerful.^
In a very general sense, classic idealists such as Plato
and Kant arbitrarily suggest a system of thought in which
one can imagine no farther or wider or deeper than a realm
of pure ideas, and the transcending faculty is, as it
were, cut short— delayed until one has come to terms with
a world of forms; we yearn for and create universals that
dwarf our very capacities to search and know; and with hope
eternal we allow ourselves no choice but to "live" in the
vacuums of dogma to which we resort. Ways of thinking and
124
feeling become crutches for ignoring our capacity for
r /*
meaning.
For the phenomenologist the irony is that, in
stressing our imprisonment in this given perceived reality
prior to penetrating, however inadequately, the realm of
pure ideas, that same Ideal realm is made less accessible
to human consciousness. To define the transcendent reality
in terms of its remoteness is to emphasize the limitations
of perception and to suggest a subject/object split in
which universals are at the mercy of subjects (those who
perceive) too timid to seek direct connection (integration)
with their objects. Philosophically, the result is a
fascination with circumscribing what and how it is possible
to perceive. Psychologically, the result is a kind of
perpetual "future shock," frustration and the distortion of
feeling in the present because of self-imposed assumptions
and categories that limit the infinite possibility of a
future; but it is also the joy and mystery of the quest,
the experience of the search for the impossible dream. Not
only has the cart (the baggage we carry, who we are, what
we perceive, what we assume) been put before the horse (the
iriving force, the unmoved mover, the source of energy, the
true, the good, the beautiful), but the vital connection
125
between horse and cart has been needlessly and arbitrarily
severed. Coleridge therefore imposes on Kant and on all
other "constructive" idealists an intentionality of trans
cendental understanding derived via the imagination from
the silence of symbols.
Similarly, Aristotle, Descartes, and Sartre, on the
opposite end of the metaphysical spectrum, suggest an
empiricist system of thought in which one can imagine
anything but affirm nothing. The transcending faculty and
the universals to which it refers become objectively irrel
evant, because they occur in the mind of a subject. In the
absence of any data to link such subjective occurrences
of meaning with any objective reality, Sartre simply chooses
to define any objective reality out of existence. What
«
"truths" there are exist as matters of convenience which
make a certain common denominator of experience possible.
We agree to call a tree a tree or the sky blue by common
consent, but our experience of the color and of the tree is
unique to each individual and refers to nothing beyond
itself. Words, for Sartre, are matters of convenience that
create a necessary illusion of objectivity so that man can
choose to function on a level of communal and humanistic
concerns. Language thus becomes a tool that defies man's
126
natural state of anarchy (complete relativism), but our
words, unlike Wallace Steven's blue guitar, do not "play
57
a tune beyond us yet ourselves." In fact, words, and all
other means of objectifying perception, become a haunting,
inescapable parody of our subjective isolation.
The pain of that human condition in which our best tools
deny us or distort our essential Being is Sartre's under
standing of the peculiar agony of man (his being and
nothingness). There is no "science of pure possibilities,"
nor one of "real facts"; and whether these "sciences"
would suggest methodologies for thinking and feeling which
ought to occur is as meaningless as the universals them
selves. There are subjective processes and their objects;
all else is vanity. To make a transcendent reality irrele
vant is to create a subject/object split by definition.
Philosophically, from the empiricist standpoint, the result
is a fascination with the art of perception (the existen
tial and pure phenomenological aspects) and with identifying
the farthest limits of an illusory objective reality based
solely on an ordering and an association of subjective per
ceptions (the aspect of analytical philosophy).
Psychologically, the result is Kierkegaard's "fear
and trembling," Sartre's "nausea," the existential anguish,
127
abandonment, and despair which come with the letting go of
a belief in meaning outside oneself. The "sickness unto
death" is the "fact" that there are no objective correla
tives for the creations and yearnings we have. The human
condition is one of perpetual, subjective awareness without
the possibility of authentic objects. This is the anguish
of isolation, the abandonment of external meanings, the
despair of freedom that is condemnation to objective
nothingness; but it is also the joy of infinite relativity,
the discovery and acceptance of uniqueness in thinking and
feeling from which each man comes consciously to experience
C O
the essence (soul) of his own being. The cart is still
before the horse, but now the horse is also dead. Cole
ridge, therefore, imposes on "constructive" empiricist
philosophers an unavoidable recognition that the "self
experience" of the mind illumines realities transcendent
to it. For the phenomenologist, no matter what his objec-
tivist inclinations, it is short-sighted either to kill off
the horse or to sever its vital link with the human cart.
I
Coleridge, in giving due credit to both subject and object,
provides a meaningful and inclusive context for the
transcendental content of his theory of imagination.
Footnotes
■^Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (New
York: Dutton, 1906), p. 43.
2Ibid., p. 139. 3Ibid.
4
Ibid., p. 26.
5
Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), p. 28.
6
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 162.
7Ibid. 3Ibid., p. 144.
^Ibid., p. 164. 10Ibid., 162.
^^"Ibid. , p. 164.
12tV ,
Ibid.
^William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight
York: New American Library, 1962), p. 201.
14
Wallace Stevens, Poems (New York: Random House,
1947), p. 73.
15
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 164.
16Ibid., p. 167 17Ibid., p. 17.
18
Ibid., p. 50.
19
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd.,
1962).
20Ibid.
128
129
21
Edmund Husserl, Ideas (London: Collier-Macmillan,
Ltd., 1931), p. 13.
22
Ibid.
23
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 17.
24 25
Ibid., p. 139. Ibid.,
P-
55.
26 . 2 7 .
Ibid. Ibid.,
P-
54.
pO p Q
Ibid., p. 55. Ibid.,
P-
56.
30 . ,
Eugene Minkowski, Lived Time: Phenomenological
and Psychopathological Studies, trans. Nancy Metzel
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970; and W. T.
Jones, Kant to Wittgenstein and Sartre (New York: Harcourt
Brace and World, Inc., 1969), commentary on Bergson and
"The Spirit of the Age," pp. 264-281.
31
Coleridge, Biography, p. 56.
"^Ibid. , p. 59. ^~*Ibid.
34 35
Ibid., p. 60. Ibid.
36, , , 37,.,
Ibid. Ibid.,
P-
61.
38 . , • 39 .
Ibid., p. 63. Ibid.,
P-
64.
40 . 41
Ibid., p. 68. Ibid.,
P-
70.
42 43
Ibid., p. 71. Ibid.
44 45
Ibid., p. 72. Ibid.,
P-
66.
46
C. G. Jung, The Portable Jung ed. and intro.
Joseph Campbell (New York: Random House
/
1971), p. 289.
47
Coleridge, Biography, p. 74.
48 49
Ibid., p. 79. Ibid.,
P-
00
U)
•
50_, . , 51T,
Ibid. Ibid.,
P-
00
( J 1
•
52
George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York:
Atheneum, 1970), p. 33.
53
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 85.
54 . 55
Ibid., p . 62 Ibid.
56
W. T. Jones, The Classical Mind (New York: Har-
court, Brace and World, 1952), p. 140; and Jones, Kant to
Wittgenstein, p. 93.
57
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans.
Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1953),
p. 78; and Stevens, Poems, p. 73.
58
Sartre, Being and Nothingness; and Jones, Kant to
Wittgenstein, pp. 390-417.
130
CHAPTER IV
INTENTIONALITY AND THE BIOGRAPHIA ;
BIOGRAPHIA X-XIII
With the conclusion of chapter IX of the Biographia,
Coleridge has provided both an epistemology and a context
for his theory of imagination. Interspersed throughout the
Biographia, but particularly in chapters XII and XIII,
Coleridge attempts to outline and define the content of
that theory. And for Coleridge, as he has already sug
gested in the first four chapters of the Biographia,
outlines and definitions are valid only insofar as they have
their source in the internalized, biographical (recollec
tions in tranquility) experiences of men of absolute genius.
In chapters X and XI Coleridge provides some additional
biographical impressions which lend intuitive (experiential)
authenticity to the abstract, transcendental, and construc
tive (transforming) philosophy he intends. In chapter X
Coleridge appropriately introduces that philosophy by making
up his own "biographical word." The word is esemplastic,
131
132
which he says he "constructed" from two of his favorite
Greek words meaning "to shape into one."'*' As discussed in
chapter III of this study, Coleridge's theory of imagination
reflects the interweaving of all ideas (reason) and of their
psychological manifestations in the human psyche (feeling)
into a recognition of transcendental unity composed of
primary (objective) and secondary (subjective) forces.
Naturally Coleridge follows this statement of his "esem-
plastic" intentions with its opposite: "the first lesson
of philosophic discipline," he says, "is to wean the
student's attention from the degree of things which alone
form the vocabulary of common life, and to direct it to the
2
kind abstracted from degree"; or to put it another way, m
order "to shape into one," we must first learn to make
useful distinctions among all our perceptions: ideas and
feelings. To seek the separateness of things, "the kind
abstracted from the degree," is, Coleridge suggests, "a far
more difficult and perplexing task" than to accept the
"vocabulary of common life," which is an artificial and
unexamined unity (a product of fancy) in which we are
conscious only "of the degree of things." But once the
difficult task of making distinctions is accomplished, the
pendulum of consciousness must be referred to the
133
esemplastic power of imagination which perceives all "diffu
sion" within the context of "the eternal act of creation in
the infinite I AM."'*
In the biographical stories ("digressions and
anecdotes"), Coleridge relates in chapters X and XI, he
gives an example of his philosophical intentions by reflect
ing on his own learning process: the "progress" from rest
ing in his own comfortable fancy and unexamined anthusiasms,
to a passion for making distinctions, and finally to an
equal passion for reconciling those distinctions into hard-
won transcendental insight. Coleridge's period of "fancy"
was evidently that time of young manhood when he was
enthusiastically peddling his magazine, The Watchman, by
which "all might know the truth and that the truth might
4
make us free." Coleridge is at his most engaging when he
describes, with the happy wisdom of hindsight, his own days
when one's allegiances were obvious and best left unexam
ined. In seeking subscriptions, he says, "I argued, I
described, I promised, I prophesied, and beginning with the
captivity of nations, I ended with the near approach of
5
the millenium." Only Coleridge, however, could put his
joyful innocence to so many severe and humorous and absurd
tests as he proceeds to describe, beginning with his "first
134
attack (to sell a subscription) . . . on a rigid Calvinist
. . . a true lover of liberty . . . who (I was informed)
has proved to the satisfaction of many that Mr. Pitt was
one of the horns of the second beast in the Revelations,
that spoke like a dragon," and ending with his becoming
inebriated on a potential buyer's pipe and later watching
incredulously as the servant girl lights the fire with his
Watchman. Clearly to live in the fancy of an unexamined
enthusiasm is to reinforce the ignorance of others and to
deny the power and value of your ideas, even if they are
worthy.
If Coleridge uses the adventures with his Watchman
to demonstrate compellingly the natural and embarrassing
result of having no philosophic discipline, of distinguish
ing only by degree and not by kind, of being rooted in the
comforts of slogans and of fancy, then he uses his alle
giance to the political wisdom of Edmund Burke to show the
value of giving up empty enthusiasms in favor of thoughtful,
sometimes painful, distinctions among thoughts and feelings
which, in philosophy, manifest as ideas and principles.
3oleridge realizes, he says, that he is no longer capable
cf an unexamined idea— which, he concludes, will make him
something of an unpopular writer. To make thoughtful
135
distinctions in politics, or in anything else for that mat
ter, is to be an outsider and to be met with hostility or
indifference by those who choose to cling to their fancies.
Coleridge says,
I could not disguise from myself that, whatever my
talents might or might not be in other respects,
yet they were not of the sort that could enable
me to become a popular writer; and that whatever
my opinions might be in themselves, they were al
most equidistant from all the three prominent par
ties . ^
?lnd Coleridge goes on to praise the example of Burke, who
teaches the very subtle art of making ideas and principles
apparent through a careful separation of kind from degree:
The satisfactory solution is that Edmund Burke
possessed and had sedulously sharpened that eye
which sees all things, actions and events in rela
tion to the laws that determine their existence and
circumscribe their possibility. He referred habitu
ally to principles. He was a scientific statesman;
and therefore a seer. For every principle contains
in itself the germs of a prophecy . . . Wearisome
as Burke's refinements appeared to his parliament
ary auditors, yet the cultivated class throughout
Europe have reason to be thankful that ". . . he went
on refining, and thought of convincing, while they
thought of dining."
Coleridge's heroes, his men of absolute genius, are
.all capable of this art of making distinctions, of refining
thought and feeling. But Coleridge also says that his own
genius born of "literary and political adventures" soon
caused his "mind to sink into a thorough state of disgust
TJ5
9
and despondency." To make distinchions authentically,
Coleridge suggests, is ultimately to see too clearly and
too well, to suffer the experiences of subjective diffusion
and struggle which characterize the secondary imagination.
The man of absolute genius perceives this subjective
disillusionment as but the "secondary" and necessary by
product of the primary search for wisdom, and he engages in
a struggle to "idealize" the transcendental unit he does
not know but to which he is inexorably linked by the
"representation in the finite mind of the eternal act of
creation in the infinite I AM"^ which marks the contra
puntal activity of the primary imagination. For Coleridge
that period of "constructive" struggle comes when he directs
his energy to an extended period of religious musings:
I retired to a cottage in Somersetshire at the
foot of Quantock, and devoted my thoughts and stud
ies to the foundations of religion and morals.
Here I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in;
broke upon me "from the fountains of the great
deep" and fell "from the windows of heaven." The
frontal truths of natural religion and the books
of Revelation alike contributed to the flood; and
it was long ere my ark touched on an Ararat, and
i i
rested. XJ-
Ultimately, Coleridge says, transcendental understanding
becomes a permanent, conscious part of the psyche (as
distinguished from the intuitive, largely unconscious
experiences of a transcendental nature that characterize
137
the "spots of time" in the lives of men of absolute genius
discussed in chapter II of this study), but only after our
comfortable fancies turn to more difficult acts of discrim
ination and judgment and only after such judgments result
in a "constructive" disillusionment in which "little by
12
little, experience wipes dry our tears."
With a pleasant and meaningful irony, Coleridge
follows these sketches of his biographical experience with
the "affectionate exhortation" of chapter XI to "never
13
pursue literature as a trade." In other words, it is not
enough to be an author, unless of course one is an. author
like Coleridge himself, who uses his talents in the service
of human education (evolution) and who thereby "establishes
14
an analogy between genius and virtue." Quite directly
Coleridge mirrors his philosophical intentions in the
"structure" of his biographical anecdotes and observations.
Ceorge Watson, in his introduction to the Biographia,
attempts to isolate its "structural" purpose by suggesting
what Coleridge probably meant in terms of philosophy (the
intentionality of the phenomenologist). Watson writes that
Coleridge "set out to write a work of metaphysics to which
ae hoped the events of his life would give a continuity; he
anded by producing a work of aesthetics to which such
138
15
narrative as there is has failed to give continuity."
Watson does not stop there but goes on to find an intuitive
unity, both profound and challenging, in the Biographia,
but it is his initial observation that typifies the many
critics who remain fascinated by the supposed limitation,
i.e., the "surface structure" of Coleridge's thought.^
Coleridge, in one of his more successful moments of
saying what he intends within the guise of a powerful
irony, readily admits the extent to which his book may be
interpreted superficially— i.e., by dullards and men of
small scope and less imagination! Surely that is the only
way to describe Coleridge's mythical "friend" who writes
the famous letter of reaction (chapter XIII of the
Biographia) to Coleridge's "shadowy" theory of imagination.
The "friend," of course, was Coleridge himself trying to
17
anticipate the voice of his critics. That voice, born and
bred in eighteenth century philosophy, was limited by its
passion for the concreteness and logic of arbitrary-arti-
18
ficial systems of thought. The letter itself is a master
piece of condescension. Coleridge's alter-ego is literally
turned upside down, "your opinion and method of argument
were not only new to me, but so directly the reverse of
all I had ever been accustomed to consider as truth, that
139
even if I had comprehended your premises sufficiently to
have admitted them and had seen the necessity of your con
clusions . . . I should still have felt as if I had been
19
standing on my head."
Coleridge, much more than is generally supposed,
was conscious of himself as a radical thinker, both in the
sense of a man out of step with his own time and in the
phenomenological sense of a seeker of essences. He had no
use for the critic who could not enter into the "deep
structure" of his work. Such a critic was an impediment to
constructive philosophy and deserved to be stood on his
head! In the letter Coleridge is not so much defending his
2 0
theories (or as some would have it, apologizing for them)
as he is assuming the role of the visionary teacher who
knows that he must teach, but who knows also that his hope
rests in being tolerated, not in being widely understood.
What Coleridge thought could not hope to be understood by
minds unable to penetrate comfortably into paradox and
unable to see shadows deepen into substance:
Those whom I had been taught to venerate as almost
super-human in magnitude of intellect I found
perched in little fretwork niches, as grotesque
dwarfs; while the grotesques, in my hitherto belief,
stood guarding the high altar with all the charac
ters of apotheosis. In short, what I had supposed
substances were thinned away into shadows, while
everywhere shadows were deepened into substances.^
140
This is Coleridge's clarion call to revolution; secure
frames of reference (emotional, mental, and spiritual) must
give way to new, less comfortable categories that can be
known not so much by faith or experience as by intima-
22
txon. Intimation (intuition?) dwarfs the gods of intel
lect and requires a new effort of human spirit, something
of which "the friend," and by extension most men, may not
be capable:
Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously
to your great book on the Constructive Philosophy
which you have promised and announced; and that I
will do my best to understand it. Only I will not
promise to descend into the dark cave of Trophonius
with you, there to rub my own eyes in order to make
the sparks and figured flashes which I am required
to s e e . 23
Clearly Coleridge is telling his audience that one
of the temptations to reading the Biographia will be to put
it into suspension, to wait for a more concrete expose of
its meaning, something which can be memorized, accepted or
rejected by a leap of faith or by a concrete, empirical
comparison. The implication is that the Biographia is to
be read from within the reader's own psyche. For Coleridge,
philosophy becomes a partnership in which the dialogue
between human beings (whether as readers or writers) is not
based on one person stating revealed truth or descriptive
observation to another, nor is the dialogue a platonic
141
manipulation whereby a wise man leads a man less wise
(evolved) to insight. ^ Rather, Coleridge's philosophy
anticipates the Jungian dialogue between each man and his
2 S
collective, archetypal foundations. Phenomenologically,
this collective is the dialogue between noesis and noema,
subject and object, an interaction between that which acts
and the feeling or thing acted upon for the purpose of
isolating and creating the shared reality or essence that
occurs between subject and object. The idea of a shared
reality, which man either creates or enters into, moves
beyond a purely subjective, objective (dualistic) psychology
or metaphysics into what might be called the dynamics of a
spiraling "third force," where the relationship between
the individual and himself, between the individual and
others (reader and writer, for example) is necessarily far
more complex than in any sort of monism or dualism.
Coleridge's "third force" consists of the "one power
with its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting
27
forces." As already discussed in chapter III of this
study, Coleridge's assumption of these two forces of one
power as the abstract foundation of a transcendental philos
ophy suggests an almost prophetic phenomenological commit
ment to the pursuit of relative paths of learning within
142
the context of a reality governed by absolutes. In the more
concrete, psychological processes of the human psyche,
these subjective experiences by which we learn become the
province of what Coleridge calls the secondary imagination,
the element of consciousness where we undergo the "diffu
sion" of simplistic and closed-minded fancies, where we
experience the "vitality of chaos and struggle, and where
in time we "re-create" a recognition "in the finite mind
28
of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM."
Coleridge implies that as we come to recognize our link to
the gods (to the infinite I AM), we approach a higher state
29
of consciousness which occurs in the activity of the
primary imagination where we experience with equal intensity
and with equal inclusiveness both "the living power and the
3 0
prime agent of human perception" and where in a period of
consciousness, intuitive understanding we transcend subject
and object alike. The result of transcending monisms and
dualisms, of finding Husserl's one Idea which underlies all
the ideas that can be imagined, marks; for Coleridge, the
evolution of man into the visionary and mystic capacity of
his men of absolute genius for which the ancient mariner
becomes a kind of collective archetype.
In light of the reconciling and transforming
143
activity of the primary imagination, Coleridge's intentions
in philosophy are ultimately "to render the mind intuitive
31
of the spiritual in man." But before we can utilize the
absolute insight of the primary imagination we must "effect
the purification of the mind by an absolute and scientific
skepticism to which the mind voluntarily determines itself
for the specific purpose of future uncertainty." In
other words, we must credit the relative merit of all ideas,
or as Coleridge goes on to say in chapter XII of the
Biographia, "the deeper . . . we penetrate into the ground
of things the more truth we discover in the doctrines of
the greater number of the philosophical sects . . . we have
imprisoned our own conceptions by the lines which we have
33
drawn, in order to exclude the conceptions of others."
In formulating his philosophy, Coleridge clearly does not
wish to exclude the conceptions of others; in fact, he is
often accused of "borrowing" too heavily, particularly from
34 .
Fichte and Schelling, but as G. N. G. Orsini points out m
his extensive study, Coleridge and German Idealism, "Cole
ridge borrowed, but he usually borrowed creatively, incor
porating other men's views with his own views as bricks in
a wall, and reaching ultimate conclusions which were essen
tially his own."^
144
In chapters XII and XIII of the Biographia, Cole
ridge does reach his own metaphysical conclusions but he
also gives credit to his philosophical "origins." He
engages in that willing skepticism (diffusion) of the
secondary imagination, "to which the mind voluntarily
determines itself for the specific purpose of future cer-
tainty" which is experienced finally in the religious
faith and vision of the primary imagination. As in chapters
V-IX of the Biographia the generally accepted dualism of
Idealism versus Materialism (rationalism versus empiricism)
3 7
is again only a point of departure for Coleridge. The
"letter to a friend" alone (actual metaphysics and aesthet
ics aside for the moment) shows his dissatisfaction with
the either-or reasoning, "The practical judgment . . . ,
taste, and sensibility" that such a world view, such a
"friend" demands. For the purpose of defining terms one
can, with some justification, hypothesize how Coleridge
might have further defined such sentiments on the prevailing
3 9
philosophy.
The idealist/rationalist says that the world (the
Dbjective) exists and functions quite apart from human per
ceptions (a tree in the forest will fall and make noise even
if there is no man to see or hear it fall). This
14E
"objective" world may have spiritual dimensions (from the
tolerance of Platonic thought to the strictness of Thomism)
or it may be an agnostic world of self-generating process
and change (from Aristotle's unmoved mover to Hume's
objects that have no categories)but in any case it is
a world that exists separately from the consciousness of
human beings. For the materialist/empiricist, on the other
hand, the world functions and exists only as an arm of man's
perceptions/consciousness (a tree falls and makes noise only
when there is a human being there to see and hear it fall).
Reality is subjective, i.e., contingent on human perception;
we create what we see and anything beyond or outside of
what our senses tell us is irrelevant, or at best beyond
our human destiny. This "subjective" world view may also
have its spiritual realms, but even the outer limits of
faith turn inward to forms of humanism and anthropomorphism
(Christian existentialists, for example, such as Paul
Tillich, who propose to make a value of "the courage to be"
within a vacuum of perceived absurdity and meaningless-
41
ness). The more usual, secular shapes of the subjective
world view, however, follow closely from Descartes' "I
think, therefore I am" and John Locke's "tabula rasa" on
which each man creates, writes, records what he is. The
'14 6
reduction of transcendent yearnings to an acceptance of
"what you see is what you've got," originated with this
attachment to empirical data rather than to imposed assump
tions; and in the twentieth century this leap of faith into
the limitations, not the expansion, of human perceptions
has taken such divergent masks as analytical philosophy,
logical positivism (the extreme of new criticism), dadaism
(the extreme of the "do your own thing" sort of relativism),
and Sartrian existentialism (the golden mean, perhaps, of
a subjectivist heritage in which each man exists to define
himself and then learns to cope with the limits he has set
up, hence Sartre's notion of man as "condemned to be
42
free"). No matter what the mask, however, a world defined
by subjectivist assumptions exists totally within, not
apart from the consciousness of human beings.
Coleridge does not take a monistic leap into one
or another mask of either side of this dualism within the
history of ideas. Instead, as discussed in chapter III of
this study, he becomes the spokesman for the "romantic"
sensibility which eschews "either-or," but consistently
43
speaks, "both-and." In his transcendental theory of
imagination, Coleridge tries to move beyond an intimation
of the reconciliation of opposites into a direct
147
philosophical confrontation that provides a reasoning
process for such reconciliation in which "the act of contem
plation makes the thing contemplated" and where "representa
tive forms of things rise up into existence^ For Cole
ridge the reasoning process centers always on the phenomena
of perception where "reality" is somehow shared by subject
and object. It makes no sense, Coleridge says, to assume
that either subject or object has an a priori, independent
grasp of what is real, because
Either the objective is taken as the first, and
then we have to account for the supervention of
the subjective which coalesces with it . . . or
the subjective is taken as the first, and the
problem then is, how there supervenes to it a
coincident objective.^5
The series of ten theses with which Coleridge con
cludes chapter XII of the Biographia represents a reasoning
process of reconciliation by which "the principle of our
knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing" where
"the self-consciousness may be the modification of a higher
a /r
form of being, perhaps of a higher consciousness." Sub
jective events in the mind and the objects of thought and
feeling (perception) which inspire them are reconciled in a
dimension of higher consciousness which "places the sole
reality of things in an absolute . . . in the absolute
identity of subject and object . . . which in its highest
T48
47
power is . . . self conscious intelligence." From the
vantage point of higher consciousness, Coleridge says that
we reflect an evolved intelligence from which
. . . we may abstract . . . the idea of an inde
structible power with two opposite and counteract
ing forces which, by a metaphor borrowed from
astronomy, we may call the centrifugal and centri-
pedal forces. The intelligence in the one tends to
objectize itself, and in the other to know itself
in the object.^
G. N. G. Orsini comments, "these theses are an abstract of
Schelling with some explanatory interpolations and a large
number of personal additions and corrections . . . reaf-
4 9
firming theistic positions." But Coleridge's interpola
tions and additions are vital, for he intends a dynamic
"theism" linked to human consciousness by the faculty of
imagination:
It will be . . . my business to construct by a
series of intuitions the progressive schemes that
must follow from such a power with such forces,
till I arrive at the fullness of the human intel
ligence . . . I assume such a power as my principle
in order to deduce from it a faculty . . . ^0
Coleridge implies that he can "arrive at the full
ness of the human intelligence" from a series of "intuitive"
progressions which are possible only for the man of absolute
genius who can bring back to memory and expression the
experiences and "facts" of a higher state of consciousness
achieved through the faculty of imagination. And for
149
Coleridge to be understood and aided in his intentions, he
must have a reader or listener equally devoted to develop
ing a capacity for constructive intuition. Clearly the
intent of Coleridge's irony in his "letter to a friend" is
to proclaim that the philosopher/poet and his reader must
engage in a common, difficult "descent into the dark cave
51
of Trophonius"; and there, as equal partners in both
effort and skill, writer and reader, "rub my [their] own
eyes in order to make the sparks and figured flashes which
5 2
I am [they are] required to see."
The effect of Coleridge's call for the descent into
his cave of learning is the prospect for a change of con
sciousness (what the phenomenologist calls Epoche, the act
of placing all assumptions into hypothetical suspension to
prepare for a purified field of consciousness) that promises
the momentary isolation of essences (Keats' truth and
beauty, Wordsworth's spots of time, James Joyce's epipha-
53
nies) described by Husserl. These essences, or archetypes
of the collective human psyche, are "required," that is, the^
are already there to be perceived, or we create them, and
they will reveal themselves to our understanding in the
"sparks and figured flashes" of illumination, if we will but
rub the dust of mental and emotional prejudice (intention-
150
ality without phenomenological awareness) from our eyes.
After the sparks, after the flashes, we must come to terms
with what we have seen (Eidetic reduction, the universal
which shows itself by default when we bracket out what is
contingent), and Coleridge implies that if we are honest,
that is, if we don't attempt to deny or to block out the
visionary event, we will be forever trying to communicate
such an experience back to ourselves (Transcendental
reduction, the reflexive requirement of phenomenological
method) and outward to others (again the noesis, subject,
noema, object, creative interaction in the phenomenological
theory of mind).
But after the flash, there is by definition, a
return to a more frustrating kind of darkness than before;
the illumined man has experienced that for which there is
as yet no objective correlative, no language to fully share
54
or even retain (consciously) what has been learned. No
wonder Coleridge calls for a reader patient with the perils
of such communication himself. And if the requirement for
reading the Biographia (or as Coleridge suggests for read
ing all "good" literature) with sufficient understanding
really is what one might already call an altered state of
consciousness, then small wonder that Coleridge's "dear
lbI
friend," who represents the dominant, conventional con
sciousness, struts with false pride and trivial harping and
refuses to "descend" with Coleridge to the very difficult
efforts that must precede initiation into new forms of
55
understanding.
Like Herman Hesse's magic theater in The Steppen-
wolfe, Coleridge's cave is "not for everybody."'’® And
Coleridge, with veiled but formidable strength, asserts
himself as being an integral player in such a theater where
human evolution takes place. To enter with him we must
earn it by rejecting the convenient categories of intellect
and by creating new, sometimes painful means of intuition
where we confront the light and shadow within and beyond
our souls. And further, Coleridge sets himself up as one
who has penetrated into such new dimensions where words
such as "soul" and "imagination" and "intuition" have a
referent within experience. He seeks to explain this world
as best he can and tries to provide guidelines for experi
encing directly the essence to which such words refer. The
57
result is a human nature forever more serious (authentic)
and committed to actualizing its evolution. It is no
accident that Coleridge demands a descent into the specific
cave of Trophonius where the Greeks were allowed to consult
152
with the resident oracle only after extensive, difficult
ritual and from which they emerged with a visible abstract
edness and seriousness by which they were recognized as •
initiates of the ancient mysteries for the rest of their
lives.
Owen Barfield, in his thorough study of the origins
and implications of What Coleridge Thought, suggests that
Coleridge clearly anticipated much of the esoteric philos
ophy that gathered strength in Europe at the turn of the
twentieth century. Barfield himself is associated with the
anthroposophical society founded as a school of alternative
scientific mysticism by the German theosophist, Rudolf
Steiner. Barfield makes many references to Coleridge's
friendship with the theosophical principle of seeking an
altered state of consciousness through a series of tests or
initiations through which "contemplation of the cognitive
limits of the understanding is the first step in supersed-
5 9
ing them." And M. H. Abrams, in discussing the forms of
romantic imagination in his book, Natural Supernaturalism,
affirms a similar desire to identify the esoteric puzzles
with the romantic sensibility:
It would be an error to regard elements derived
from the esoteric tradition as . . . aberrations
which discredit the writings in which they occur
. . . it is now becoming apparent that the esoteric
. _ T53
view of the universe as a plenum of opposed yet
mutually attractive - . . forces— which was dis
credited and displaced by Cartesian and Newtonian
mechanism, but was revived, in a refined form, in
the Naturphilosophic of Schelling in Germany and of
Coleridge in England— proceeded, by a peripety of
intellectual history, to feed back into scientific
thought some of the most productive hypotheses of
nineteenth century and modern physics.
Interestingly, the wedding of a kind of scientific occult
ism to a transcendental philosophy promotes a trained and
expanded consciousness, as does the dynamic link that exists
between the austerity of phenomenological method and the
visionary intentions of phenomenological style.
Perhaps it is not too much to suggest that Coleridge
sees himself and his "serious readers as fellow initiates
who now seek only to learn from one another and to remember
and teach their experience of an altered consciousness by
putting it into words at once opaque and concrete. The
assumption is that to see "through a glass darkly" is a
process of learning, for both reader and writer, far more
wise than to look out through a window or at a mirror. In
any case, his many apologies for a style and philosophy
that don't quite hold together seem to be addressed to the
more serious readers of his work in quest of their own
growth, not to the many "dear friends" who cannot understand
(nor do they deserve to, it would seem) the impossibility
]33
of translating a change of consciousness into words.
Coleridge and the readers he would select are willing
partners in the perpetual efforts toward such a translation,
and like Trophonius himself, who designed the temple of
Apollo, they (we) become the architects of a common destiny
linked to the nature of the gods.
In his seminal studies, L. R. Farnell finds that
"the image of Trophonius in the sacred cave bore a staff
intertwined with serpents, the usual symbol of the healing
61
god." For author and reader alike, the plunge into the
Biographia was to be (should be) a healing journey where
each man is raised to the intuitive level of which he is
capable. Very probably Coleridge was familiar with issues
598 and 599 of Addison's Spectator, in which he describes
the teaching/healing function of Trophonius' cave. Addison
imagines himself as a resident, assistant oracle in the cave
to which he invites all those who wish to become more seri
ous. He has great success with a wide variety of visitors,
all of whom emerge older and wiser than before. Eventually,
however, Addison, like Coleridge, finds himself surrounded
by whole clumps of people unwilling to be enlightened:
Seeing myself surrounded with a body of Free
Thinkers and scoffers at religion who were making
themselves merry at the sober looks and thoughtful
brows of those who had been in the cave, I thrust
155
them all in one after another and locked the door
upon them. Upon my opening it they all looked as
if they had been frightened out of their wits and
were marching away with ropes in their hands to a
wood that was within sight of the place. I found
they were not able to bear their first serious
thought, but knowing these would finally bring
them to a better frame of mind, I gave them into
the custody of their friends until that happy change
was wrought.^
Similarly, Coleridge gives such ignorance to the
custody of his writing, his one "friend," and he makes the
association most strongly in his introduction to the 1818
three volume edition of his second periodical, appropriately
named The Friend. Basil Willey points out that Coleridge
here
. . . warns his readers that he will expect from
them both thought and attention and that "thinking
is neither an easy nor an amusing employment" He
will be referring them in all things to principles
and fundamental truths— in which the intellect
must be habituated to clear conceptions— but the
heart must be brought into play as well as the
head.
And Coleridge in the fifteenth essay in The Friend, written
when he was in the process of giving a workable form to
the Biographia, places the intentionality of his thought
into perspective:
. . . merely the referring of the mind to its own
consciousness for truths indispensable to its own
happiness. To what purposes do I or am I about
to employ them? To perplex our clearest notions
and living moral instincts? To deaden the feel
ings of will and free power, to extinguish the
156
light of love and of conscience, to make myself
and others worthless, soul-less, God-less? No!
To expose the folly and the legerdemain of those
who have thus abused the blessed gift of language;
to support all old and venerable truths; and by
them to support, to kindle, to project the spirit,
to make the reason spread light over our feelings,
to make our feelings, with their vital warmth,
actualize our reason:— these are my objects, these
are my subjects . . . ^4
Owen Barfield finds a familiar context for such
intentions and paraphrases them well when he says, "Cole
ridge . . . absorbed a neoplatonic and hermetic philosophy
of 'beauty' before he began to think about 'imagination';
. . . his was a mind acutely aware of its own activity;
and it is precisely out of such an awareness that the
philosophical problem of 'beauty' turns readily into the
psychological and philosophical problem of 'imagination.'
It is this problem that forms the central substance of the
65
Biographia Literaria as it stands." And as M. H. Abrams
has pointed out, that relationship between aesthetics and
metaphysics (philosophy and psychology as applied to
"beauty" and "imagination") provides for Coleridge, and the
romantics for whom he speaks a mirror to reflect the self
by means of reflection and a lamp to illumine the not-self
r rr
by means of perception. In metaphysics we seek to say
something about what is illumined through the way in which
we appropriate "it" into our own minds; the task restated
157
so often in the Biographia is "to make the external inter-
nal, the internal external."
The difficulty with so much of the criticism on
Coleridge is the failure to take with equal seriousness
f t
the internal and the external reality. Evan Barfield,
who is sympathetic to how Coleridge develops ideas, is
disposed to call the Biographia "that tantalizing and cer-
69
tainly unsatisfactory produce of genius"; unsatisfactory,
however, only as a structured "constructive philosophy,"
which identifies the nature and relationship of subject and
object as mental constructs and which, in the context of
Coleridge’s letter to himself, is the rather wearisome
expectation of the unenlightened. And Abrams, too, views
.Coleridge's work as having "implicitly succumbed . . . to
the actuality of his own experience of a concept of the
mind in perception against which his own philosophy of the
active, projective, and creative mind had been a sustained
70
refutation." Rather than mistake Coleridge's predilection
for self-pity for actual and sustained disappointment with
himself, it is wiser to emphasize the respect for his inten
tions and for his sensibility which the Biographia engen- .
ders. Max F. Schulz in a rewarding study of Coleridge's
poetic sensibility suggests that Coleridge was quite
. I5E
comfortable in his ambivalent posture between internal and
external realities. "Coleridge," he says, "found the world
of his thoughts as fascinating as the world of reality,
constantly moving in his poetry from consideration of the
external object to consideration of its impression on his
7 1
mind." This alert moving back and forth between subject
and object mirrors the process of a reconciling state of
mind that Coleridge proposes in the Biographia and which,
in the major poems, Schulz suggests, "can be heard as an
undersong" in which each poem "pursues the defined objective
of a specific form, while transcending that form to reflect
the dominant vision of a constantly synthesizing and uni-
7 2
fying sensibility." So, too, in the Biographia there is
an "undersong" of the experience of the subjective paths of
learning (the forms) within the context of a reality
governed by absolutes (the vision).
Satisfaction with the Biographia rests in perceiving
it not as a system of thought but as a model for a system
of thought worth having (i.e., constructive) and represented
in all ages by men of absolute genius:
. . . a few, who measuring and sounding the rivers
of the vale at the feet of their furthest, inacces
sible falls, have learnt that the sources must be
far higher and far inward; a few who even in the
level streams have detected elements which neither
the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains
159
contained or could supply. How and whence to these
thoughts, these strong probabilities, the ascertain
ing vision, the intuitive knowledge, may finally
supervene, can be learnt only by the f a c t . 7 3
The "fact" to which Coleridge refers is the internalized
experience which is the end product (essence) of phenome
nological reduction. The goal, it would seem, of "measuring
and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their
furthest, inaccessible falls" or of taking such "soundings"
at the more common event of "level streams" is to learn that
the sources of our being are "higher and far inward," that
is, esoteric, more complex levels of abstraction which
approach an altered and finally a higher consciousness
through reason and feeling and then turn inward and become
a "fact" of understanding experienced byond rational con
structs (ideas and their words) through the "elements" of
intuition and imagination. These "elements" function as
symbols of sources, "as a representation in the finite mind
of the eternal act of creation"(essence), but primarily
they are attributes of the human psyche "which neither the
vale itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or
could supply." Imagination and the other "elements" become
models for experiencing the "fact" of essence; and as both
symbols and models of a process that exists between man and
what he perceives, they are neither contained in nor
160
supplied by the vale and the mountains and the level
streams (all expressions of different masks of an objective
reality). Rather they emerge as part of the phenomena of
perception and function as mediators between the objective
"thou" and the subjective "I" so that the "intuitive know
ledge, the ascertaining vision, may finally supervene,"
that is, become apparent to human consciousness and inte
grated with it.
Footnotes
"^Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
(New York: Dutton, 1906), p. 91.
2Ibid.,
P-
92. 3Ibid.
/ P-
167.
4Ibid.,
P-
96. 5Ibid.
/ P*
98.
^Ibid.,
P-
97. 7Ibid.
/ P-
102.
8Ibid.,
P-
105. 9Ibid.
/ P-
110.
10T, . ,
Ibid.,
P-
167. i:LIbid.
/ P-
111.
i:LIbid. ,
P-
126. 13Ibid.
/ P-
127.
14Ibid.,
P-
128.
15 „
George Watson, introduction to Coler
Biographia Literaria, p. xix.
16
Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Har-
court Brace Javanovich, Inc., 1972), p. 83.
17
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 164; also see
fn. by George Watson, ed.
Dear C.,
You ask my opinion concerning your Chapter on
the Imagination, both as to the impressions it made
on myself and as to those which I think it will
make on the public, i.e. that part of the public who,
from the title of the work and from its forming a
sort of introduction to a volume of poems, are
likely to..constitute the great majority of your
readers.
As to myself, and stating in the first place
the effect on my understanding, your opinions and
161
162
method of argument were not only so new to me, but
so directly the reverse of all I had ever been
accustomed to consider as truth, that even if I
had comprehended your premises sufficiently to
have admitted them and had seen the necessity of
your conclusions, I should still have been in that
state of mind, which in your note, p. 75, 76, you
have so ingeniously evolved as the antithesis to
that in which a man is when he makes a bull. In
your own words, I should have felt as if I had
been standing on my head.
The effect on my feelings, on the other hand,
I cannot better represent than by supposing myself
to have known only our light airy modern chapels
of ease, and then for the first time to have been
placed, and left alone, in one of our largest
Gothic cathedrals in a gusty moonlight night of
autumn. "Now in glimmer, and now in gloom";
often in palpable darkness not without a chilly
sensation of terror; then suddenly emerging into
broad yet visionary lights with coloured shadows,
of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy
insignia and mystic symbols; and ever and anon
coming out full upon pictures and stone-work
images of great men, with whose names I was famil
iar but which looked upon me with countenances
and an expression, the most dissimilar to all I
had been in the habit of connecting with those
names. Those whom I had been taught to venerate
as almost super-human in magnitude of intellect
I found perched in little fret-work niches, as
grotesque dwarfs; while the grotesques, in my
hitherto belief, stood guarding the high altar
with all the characters of Apotheosis. In short,
what I had supposed substances were thinned away
into shadows, while everywhere shadows were deep
ened into substances:
If substance may be call'd that shadow seem'd,
For each seem'd either!
Milton
Yet after all, I could not but repeat the
lines which you had quoted from a MS. poem of your
own in The Friend and applied to a work of Mr
Wordsworth's, though with a few of the words
altered:
-------------An orphic tale indeed,
A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts
To a strange music chaunted!
Be assured, however, that I look forward anx
iously to your great book on the Constructive
Philosophy which you have promised and announced:
and that I will do my best to understand it. Only
I will not promise to descend into the dark cave of
Trophonius with you, there to rub my own eyes in
order to make the sparks and figured flashes which
I am required to see.
So much for myself. But as for the public, I
do not hesitate a moment in advising and urging you
to withdraw the Chapter from the present work, and
to reserve it for your announced treatise on the
Logos or communicative intellect in Man and Deity.
First, because imperfectly as I understand the
present Chapter, I see clearly that you have done
too much- and yet not enough. You have been obliged
to omit so many links from the necessity of compres
sion, that what remains looks (if I may recur to my
former illustration) like the fragments of the wind
ing steps of an old ruined tower. Secondly, a still
stronger argument (at least one that I am sure will
be more forcible with you) is that your readers
will have both right and reason to complain of you.
This Chapter, which cannot, when it is printed,
amount to so little as an hundred pages, will of
necessity greatly increase the expense of the work;
and every reader who, like myself, is neither pre
pared or perhaps calculated for the study of so
abstruse a subject so abstrusely treated, will, as
I have before hinted, be almost entitled to accuse
you of a sort of imposition on him. For who, he
might truly observe, could from your title-page,
viz. My Literary Life and Opinions, published too
as introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems,
have anticipated, or even conjectured, a long
treatise on ideal Realism, which holds the same
relation in abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus
does to Plato. It will be well, if already you
have not too much of metaphysical disquisition in
your work, though as the larger part of the
164
disquisition is historical, it will doubtless be
both interesting and instructive to many to whose
unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplas-
tic power would be utterly unintelligible. Be
assured, if you do publish this chapter in the pres
ent work, you will be reminded of Bishop Berkeley's
Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which
beginning with Tar ends with the Trinity, the omne
scibile forming the interspace. I say in the
present work. In that greater work to which you
have devoted so many years, and study so intense and
various, it will be in its proper place. Your
prospectus will have described and announced both
its contents and their nature; and if any persons
purchase it who feel no interest in the subjects of
which it treats, they will have themselves only to
blame.
I could add to these arguments one derived from
pecuniary motives, and particularly from the prob
able effects on the sale of your present publica
tion; but they would weigh little with you compared
with the preceeding. Besides, I have long observed
that arguments drawn from your own personal inter
ests more often act on you as narcotics than as
stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some
small portion of pig-nature in your moral idiosyn-
cracy, and like these amiable creatures must occa
sionally be pulled backward from the boat in order
to make you enter it. All success attend you, for
if hard thinking and hard reading are merits you
have deserved it.
Your affectionate, etc.
18
James Robert De J. Jackson, Coleridge; The Criti
cal Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970); and Basil
Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc., 1972), pp. 125-26.
19
Coleridge, Biographia, pp. 164-65.
20
Watson, Introduction to Biographia, p. xix.
21
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 165.
- j - g - g
220wen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), p. 117.
23
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 165.
24
W. T. Jones, The Classical Mind (New York: Har-
court, Brace & World, 1952), pp. 135-38.
25
C. G. Jung, The Portable Jung, ed. and intro.
Joseph Campbell (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 59.
2 6
Frank Goble, The Third Force (New York: Pocket
Books, Inc., 1970), pp. 11-37; and Rollo May, Love and
Will (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969), introduction.
27
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 163.
28Ibid., p. 167.
29
Meyer Howard Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism
(New York: Norton, 1971); and Thomas McFarland, Coleridge
and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969),
pp. 286-89.
30
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 167.
31Ibid., p. 139. 32Ibid., p. 147.
33Ibid., p. 142.
34
G. N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969),
p. 203.
35 .
Ibid., p. 217.
36~
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 147.
37
McFarland, Coleridge, pp. xxiv-xxviii.
3 8
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 164.
39
McFarland, Coleridge, pp. xxviii-xl.
T66I
4 f )
Jones, The Classical Mind, pp. 214-24, 230; and
W. T. Jones, Hobbes to Hume (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1969), pp. 296-322, 326-37.
41
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1952), pp. 84-85; and Rollo May, Man1s
Search for Himself (New York: A Signet Book, published by
The New American Library, 1967).
42
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans.
Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1948).
48McFarland, Coleridge, p. xxiv.
44Coleridge, Biographia, p. 144.
45Ibid., p. 146. 46Ibid., p. 154.
47Ibid., p. 155. 48Ibid., p. 156.
49
Orsini, Coleridge, pp. 207-9.
I. This thesis recalls the definition of truth
as the coincidence of an object with the subject,
from which we started in the preliminary discussion
(as well as in the Essays, SW, I, 365). Coleridge
adds: "to know is in its essence a verb active,"
anticipating Thesis VII.
II. Coleridge takes over Schelling's distinc
tion between conditioned and unconditioned knowledge
(III, 362), terming it however "mediate or immediate
truth": "the former is of dependent or conditional
certainty" (BL, I, 180). The Scholium, with the
simile of the chain without a staple, and the imag
inatively presented argument of the cycle of equal
truths, is to all appearance Coleridge's own.
III. The concept of absolute truth is here
defined as a truth "which is its own predicate"
(I, 181). The relation of the predicate to the sub
ject in an absolutely true proposition is discussed
by Schelling in Section VI of page 364, but the
bold formula of Thesis III is apparently Coleridge's
own.
IV. "That there can be but one such principle,
may be proved a priori" (I, 181). Schelling affirms
this on page 354. At the beginning of the following
rF7
chapter Schelling argues that this principle cannot
be derived from any other principle above it (p.
361), which may have suggested Coleridge's more
detailed demonstration of the thesis. The Scholium
is Coleridge's own and contains a dig at James
Beattie, who thought he could refute Hume by means
of mere common sense (I, 182). Beattie, incidentally,
turned out to be the source of Kant's knowledge of
Hume's Treatise, as we saw in Chapter 2.
V. "Such a principle cannot be any THING or
OBJECT" (I, 182). This point is made in III, 368,
but we saw it more fully argued in the Essays (I,
367), in the passage quoted earlier in this chapter.
The conclusion of the Thesis is the Schellingian
"identity" of subject and object (III, 356).
VI. This thesis is one of the most important,
since Coleridge here begins by making a perfect
statement of the idealistic doctrine of the abso
lute self-consciousness, and then brings forward his
theistic qualifications to it. First, the affirma
tion of self-consciousness: "In this, and in this
alone, object and subject, being and knowing are
identical, each involving and supposing the other.
In other words, it is a subject which becomes a
subject by the act of constructing itself objec
tively to itself; but which never is an object
except for itself, and only so far as by the very
same act it becomes a subject" (I, 183).
Coleridge makes here a classic formulation of
the doctrine expounded both in the Essays and in the
System (e.g., Ill, 364-65). But in the Scholium he
makes the qualification that this argument refers
only to knowledge and not to existence. Actually
the argument provides for that when it says that
"the subject becomes a subject by constructing
itself objectively," since to become is to acquire
existence. Coleridge goes on to admit that exist
ence and knowledge can be identified, but this
occurs only in "the absolute self, the great eternal
I AM," and the footnote makes it clear that the
latter is the same Spirit in whom St. Paul said that
"we live, and move, and have our being" (I, 184, n.),
a text quoted also by Schelling, On human freedom
(SW, VII, 349). The reference which follows to "the
conditioned finite I . . . called by Kant's follow
ers the empirical I" (ibid.) may well be again to
_____
Schelling, who repeatedly expounds the distinction
between the absolute I and the empirical I (III,
374-75; also I, 442).
VII. In this thesis Coleridge continues to
affirm the doctrine of the absolute self, which
being the subject cannot be an object. "It must
therefore be an ACT; for every object is, as an
object, dead, fixed, incapable in itself of any
action, and necessarily finite" (I, 184-85). Cole
ridge has gone back to the Essays for reinforcements
(I, 367). An act, he goes on to say, implies "a
will" (I, 185). A very important new concept is
here introduced, that of the Will, which Schelling
also introduces later in the System (Wollen, III,
533 ff.), and had already introduced in the Essays
(I, 393 and 401). It will assume increasing impor
tance in both Schelling's and Coleridge's later
speculations. Not much of it, however, is made
here, although it returns in Thesis IX.
VIII. An object is always finite: Coleridge
is again going back to the Essays (I, 367).
IX. The distinction between the principium
essendi and the principium cognoscendi made here is
also made, with the same Latin terms, in the System
(III, 368), and there also the two are identified.
Then Coleridge refers back to the preliminary dis
cussion of the objective and the subjective (I,
185, cf. 174-78). But he ends with a reaffirmation
of theism: "We proceed from the SELF, in order to
lose and find all self in GOD" (I, 186).
X. This thesis is translated with minor altera
tions and explanatory interpolations from the System
(III, 355-56). The translation ends at line 30 of
page 187. Coleridge then proceeds to refer to the
philosophy of Malebranche, "that we see all things
in God" (I, 187, 11. 31-32) and from there he passes
on to quote a devotional passage from Synesius'
Hymns (I, 188). He then reverts to transcendental
ism, and envisages a philosophical system which will
account for the universe by the interaction of "two
opposite and counteracting forces." He concludes:
"it will be hereafter my business to construct by a
series of intuitions the progressive schemes, that
must follow from such a power with such forces, till
I arrive at the fullness of human intelligence"
(I, 188). This programme was exactly the one that
169
Schelling carried out in his System (giving to
"intuition" its technical meaning), and Coleridge
will return to it in Chapter XIII of the Biographia.
50
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 156.
51L. P. Farnell, Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of
Immortality,(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), p. 245; and
Jones, The Classical Mind, pp. 135-38.
52
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 164.
53
Edmund Husserl, Ideas (London: Collier-Macmillan,
Ltd., 1931), pp. 5-14, 20-21.
54
Richard Haven, Patterns of Consciousness: An Essay
on Coleridge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1969), pp. 16-17, 100-1.
55
W. T. Jones, Kant to Wittgenstein and Sartre (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), pp. 21-27.
56
Herman Hesse, Steppenwolfe (New York: Holt, Rine
hart & Winston, 1957).
57
Husserl, Ideas, pp. 20-21.
58
Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 157.
59
Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, p. 229.
60
Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 171.
61
Farnell, Greek Hero Cults, p. 245.
6 2
Richard Addison, The Spectator; Friday, September
24, 1714, #598; Monday, September 27, 1714, #599; London
Stereotype Edition, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. J. Woodward,
1832), vol. 2, pp. 390-92.
6 3
Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, pp. 123-24.
64
Ibid., pp. 124-25, quoting Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Friend," in The Collected Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed.
Barbara Rooke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp.
107-8.
T m
^Barfield, What Coleridge Thought/ pp. 72-73.
6 6
Meyer Howard Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp (New
York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1953).
6 V
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 258.
68 . . .
J. R. De J. Jackson, Method and Imagination xn
Coleridge's Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1969), pp. 1-21.
69
Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, p. 173.
70
Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 459.
71
Max F. Schulz, Poetic Voices of Coleridge (De
troit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), p. 187.
72Ibid., p. 189.
73
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 138.
74
Ibxd., p. 167
CHAPTER V
COLERIDGE'S THEORY OF IMAGINATION IN
THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
"The Rime of The Ancient Mariner" gives to the
abstractions of the Biographia a concrete and symbolic
frame of reference in which Coleridge provides a plot and
metaphors for his "story" of philosophy. M. H. Abrams and
other major critics have indicated that "certain major
poets of the Romantic Age . . . incorporated into their
writings myths and imagery . . . used . . . as symbolic
conveniences, metaphors for poetry."'*' In light of the
Biographia, the "Rime" may be read as the symbolic repre
sentation of Coleridge's transcendental philosophy in which,
according to Abrams, the central metaphor becomes "the sense
of being an alien in a world which had been made by man's
own unhappy intellect . . . manifested in the wanderings of
2
an exile in quest of the place where he truly belongs."
?Vnd Richard Haven, referring to Leslie Stephen's remark that
"with a little ingenuity one could find in 'The Ancient
171
1/2
3
Mariner1 all of Coleridge's philosophy," says that this
notion is true not because the poem necessarily embodies
some of Coleridge's philosophical concepts, but because
"the poem is the final and successful culmination of a
series of efforts to create in a poetic object an 'objective
correlative' for inner phenomenon which the philosophy tries
4
to account for in abstract, theoretical terms." Haven goes
on to say that as the correlative of inner experience, "The
poem does not appeal to the rationalizing intellect . . .
it presents experiences for contemplation, not speculation"
and ultimately, in reading the poem, "we are made powerfully
5
aware of possible modes of consciousness."
What follows, then, in the final chapter of this
study, is what Haven would call a "contemplative" reading of
the poem, not a thorough analysis or critical survey, but a
way of seeing the Rime phenomenologically, i.e., as a model
of Coleridge's thought which allows for the many persuasive
ways in which the poem has been interpreted, precisely
because it so compactly reflects Coleridge's theory of
learning and of imagination as expressed in the Biographia.
As Haven has pointed out, Coleridge is fascinated by "pat
terns of consciousness" through which his mystical insight
becomes "a recognizable kind of experience" and in which
TT3
that insight, brought to consciousness through the esera-
plastic (shaping, transforming) power of imagination is
expressed symbolically both in Coleridge's poetry and in his
prose. In chapter IX of the Biographia, Coleridge says
convincingly, "an idea, in the highest sense of that word,
7
cannot be conveyed but by a symbol."
In the context of such symbolic patterns, the Rime
becomes Coleridge's archetype for the collective experience
by which we may become Coleridge's men of absolute genius
who "rest content between thought and reality, as it were,
in an intermundium of which their own living spirit supplies
O
the substance, and their imagination the ever varying form.
The process by which we may reach such an "intermundium,"
which in the Biographia yields transcendental understanding,
is implicit in Coleridge's theory of imagination; and this
process of learning is represented symbolically by the
"inner experience" of the ancient mariner himself who seeks
spiritual awareness by sailing through the psychological and
philosophical maya of fancy (The Rime: parts I-III) to the
painful "redemption," diffusion and recreation, of the
secondary imagination (The Rime: part IV), finally arriving
at and earning the transforming vision of the primary
imagination (The Rime: parts V-VII) from which he emerges as
174
the wandering prophet telling the story of human evolution
to those who have ears to hear and learn:
I pass like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me;
To him my tale I teach.^
Referring to the wandering prophet who has a tale
to teach, John Livingston Lowes suggests that "Coleridge
was strongly influenced by two great legends of Christian
ity: the Wandering Jew and the Wandering of Cain."'*'® Lowes
points out that in these legends the experience of wandering
has a purpose that combines the act of expiation with the
teaching/healing vision of an ideal. The mariner's "pen
ance" at the end of the poem, which is to retell his story
when a certain anguish arises in his soul, must be seen in
the context of what he has become, a man transformed by
vision and capable of communicating transcendental under
standing. The mariner is one "chosen" to examplify human
growth and his "penance" may indeed reflect the irony common
to many spiritual paths: that redemptive suffering and
responsibility is the burden of those who have passed
through the stages of learning that result in a more evolved
state which Coleridge calls the "intermundium" of absolute
genius. M. H. Abrams and others who take the notion of
17b
crime and penance literally ignore the teaching, healing
function of the mariner and only see him "passing by and
talking, talking, talking."'*''*' Perhaps E. M. W. Tillyard
has the best and most concise reply to such a- "rational"
reading of the poem. Tillyard says that what the mariner
becomes through what he experiences after he kills the
albatross is much more important than the act of killing the
albatross itself; that act sets things in motion and car
ries the mariner on a "spiritual adventure" which "looks far
forth" and also searches inward: "The sea voyage, then,"
Tillyard writes, "indicates spiritual adventure, as the
ordinary journey or pilgrimage indicates the course of nor
mal life. And it is not everyone who goes out of his way to
12
seek adventure." Tillyard, writing in the spirit of the
phenomenological concern for essence and method, begins with
the beginning, with the "fact" that to embark on the Mari
ner's voyage is to enter the magic theatre and to begin the
process of a spiritual evolution in which the sequence and
character of the "adventures" suggest the stages by which
we move from what Coleridge calls in the Biographia "The
first range of hills that encircles the scanty vale of human
life" to those "sources . . . far higher and far inward
. . . which neither the vale itself nor the surrounding
176
13
mountains contain or could supply."
"There was a ship," says the mariner in the first
line of his tale, and it set sail with great joy and cele
bration:
The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill
Below the lighthouse top
The Sun came up upon the left
Out of the sea came heI
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.^-4
The sun shines on the mariner's decision to go on this
particular voyage; he could, after all, have stayed in a
harbor safe from "spiritual adventure," but he chooses the
open sea -where he can no longer be sheltered from actualiz
ing the farther reaches of his humanity. To engage in the
process of recovering what Coleridge calls his "I-ship" is
to choose to set sail in the first place. At such a time
there is great "interior" celebration, and appropriately
Coleridge juxtaposes the mariner's story to the festivities
of a wedding feast where implicitly he honors the marriage
of man's conscious will to the stirrings of his soul. The
redding guest is Coleridge's "Everyman" who cannot attend
this ceremony until he hears and understands the mariner's
tale; i.e., until he, too, chooses to embark on his own
TT7
voyage of "spiritual adventure." Like Moses viewing the
Promised Land, the wedding guest can see the place prepared
for him, "The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear
15
the merry dm?" but he cannot enter or experience its
"promise" until with the mariner he becomes "A sadder and a
wiser man," made "ancient" in the sorrow and the pity and
the joy by which we acquire transcendental knowledge. The
wedding guest is stunned and "of sense forlorn." He is not
yet a member of the wedding, whereas the mariner's "eye is
bright," not with the fires of madness or guilt or penance,
but with the illumination of absolute genius which, in the
Biographia, is the touchstone of Coleridge's philosophy:
the "wedding" of "thought and reality," of subject and
object. Until the wedding guest (Everyman) experiences in
his own way the teachings of the mariner (i.e., until he
develops the capacity for spiritual vision in his own eye),
he fails to open the door to the marriage of thought
(subject: his individual consciousness) and reality (object:
his transcendental soul):
The Mariner, whose eye is bright
Whose beard with age is hoar
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.
He went like one that hath been stunned
And is of sense forlorn.16
_ X7B
Actual "madness" lies in the naxvete of the wedding
guest before he encounters the mariner, a time when every
man elects to keep the ship of his soul safe in a harbor of
ignorance. The first step toward wisdom is the willingness
to listen, a rare quality because the mariner only "stop-
17
peth one of three." And once we stop to listen, we must
become like children, receptive to the sage who speaks
through the "greybeard loon":
The Wedding-Guest stood still
And listens like a three years' child:
*1 O
He cannot choose but hear. °
What we "hear" is the document of "that ancient man, the
19
bright-eyed Mariner," whose "adventures" serve as a model
for the path away from ignorance toward transcendental
understanding. No wonder Coleridge celebrates the sailing
of his ship.
To choose a "spiritual adventure" results first of
all in a necessary act of self-consciousness in which the
mariner is driven to differentiate himself from the "normal"
course of human events, represented in the Rime by the crew
who act, as most men, with a collective consciousness born
of habit and fear. The albatross becomes for the crew an
omen of God's saving grace; they feed and pamper it, only
too glad to be relieved of the burden of responsibility for
rrg
guiding their ship through the storm and the fog of Part I
of the poem. But the mariner wants no such deus ex machina;
in the vein of twentieth century existentialism, he chooses
to "act" without the comforts of an "easy" faith or virtue,
and by killing the albatross determines responsibility for
\
his own "future." To make the learning process "construc
tive," Coleridge suggests, we must, very early in our
journey, choose to stand alone and assume the burden of our
freedom--which is to go on without the good omen of the
gods or the moral support of our fellows. Richard Haven
writes:
The Mariner begins his voyage as one of a group: it
is not until the last line of part I that he uses
the word "I": "I killed the albatross." Until
then, he has used only the plural pronoun, the
collective "we." It is with his unmotivated,
inexplicable act of violence that he becomes a
self conscious individual rather than a social unit
. . It is thus that we become individual to our
selves, thus, in Blake's terms, that we enter the
world of experience. "I" discover myself by discov
ering the difference between "I" and "it," by
opposing, resisting, killing, "it." The Mariner
. . . now becomes the one individual, the dominent
actor, . . . but his very existence as an individ
ual leads directly to his agony as he finds himself
not only apart but alone, an alien ego in a uni
verse of "it," tortured by the isolation of his
own selfhood a selfhood so rigid that "I could not
die."20
In the act of killing the albatross the mariner
recognizes the dualism of subject and object, of thought and
180
reality; he has discovered that an "I-ship" exists, but he
has not yet learned that to discover the difference between
"I" and "it" is also to discover himself. And like the
restless potential that assails the mind of Coleridge's man
of "commanding genius" in chapter II of the Biographia (as
distinguished from the integrated understanding— the resting
content between thought and reality— that describes the man
of absolute genius), so too the mariner experiences the
chaos of a rigid mind. He is driven, as it were, "to
impress his preconceptions on the world without in order to
present them back to his own view with the satisfying degree
27
of clearness, distinctness and individuality." And Cole
ridge goes on to say that such men, who have begun to know
the power in their minds, can in "tranquil times" create the
"perfect poem or palace" by imposing their preconceptions
artfully upon the world: '
But alas! in times of tumult they are the men des
tined to come forth as the shape spirit of Ruin, to
destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute
the fancies of a day, and to change kings and king
doms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds.
And so the mariner kills the albatross and becomes that
"shaping spirit of Ruin," rigid in the dogmas of his new
found "I-ship," ultimately destined, like the phoenix, to
rise from the ashes of his fancies and through imagination
181
finally to achieve the wholistic vision of absolute genius.
If, on the one hand, to kill the albatross is to
"create" the self-consciousness which makes evolution pos
sible, it is also, as George Whalley points out, to kill the
23
soaring eagle within which is the imagination; or, to put
it another way, with the shooting of the albatross man has
made a necessary assertion of self, but he has also denied
his "Christian soul" (a quality which the man of absolute
genius affirms and integrates with his self-consciousness).
In his role as model and teacher the mariner shows, that in
taking the risk of losing our life, we recover its "soul"
by passing through the delusions of fancy to the enlighten
ing transformations of the imagination. Maud Bodkin and
others have seen a parallel to the rebirth archetype in this
"passage" of the mariner; his "adventures" become the
24
"story" of the rebirth archetype.
In parts II and III of the Rime, Coleridge suggests
how the delusions of fancy manifest themselves. Primarily
there is the horror of human complicity in the sustaining
of ignorance. The seamen do not understand the killing of
the albatross and they react purely on the most literal of
associations, an approach, Coleridge says in the Biographia,
which results in "the mistaking the conditions of a thing
182
2 5
for its causes and essence." Thus, at first, the seamen
blame the mariner:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!^®
But then when the sun comes out to dissipate the fog and
mist, they are equally inaccurate with praise:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.^
The seamen demonstrate how the perceptions of the "group"
adjust to whatever "reality" happens to apply at the moment.
They do not penetrate into the meaning of what they "see"
but are imprisoned in fancy through which they "must receive
all . . . materials ready made from the law of associa-
2 8
rion." And as Max F. Schulz points out, the seamen
respond to the mariner's act "with righteousness or abhor
rence, depending on the weather they consider the act to
have provoked . . . there is little reaction to the deed in
rerms of a moral code. They punish the mariner because they
think that the killing has affected the wind, not because
they think that the killing is bad."^
The seamen as a group perceive events in terms of
their immediate consequences; they can never create or
__
. 183
synthesize or understand, for they are bound to what Cole
ridge calls "a mode of memory" which becomes the dogma of
consecutive associations. For Coleridge the lack of a
"moral" intentionality tied to a mechanical mode of percep
tion can only result in complete stagnation. And so the
seamen are utterly becalmed in the "silent sea" of fancy
where their ship literally has no "reality" and rests, "As
idle as a painted ship / upon a painted ocean."^ Then the
ghost ship comes and with it "Death" to all the seamen who
are void of that interior assertion that demands both I and
Thou from which the mariner "acts." To enter this magic
theater is not enough; one must be willing to "act" there,
which is why it is "not for Everybody." "Death-in-Life"
becomes the mariner's "lot," not for the sake of penance
but for the "constructive" purpose of being "reborn" to
transcendental understanding (the wedding of self-conscious
ness to other consciousness) through the experiences of the
secondary and primary imaginations. In recognizing the
mariner's voyage as "a record of the evolution of a self,"
Richard Haven equates the responses the mariner evokes from
crew, wedding guest, and reader; and hev suggests that all
three "groups" project an apparent sanity, a "cozy security"
(fancy) challenged by the seemingly insane mariner who
184
places all security into jeopardy. We die insofar as "we
31
explain him away."
By part IV of the Rime we can no longer explain the
mariner away; if we enter with him into the complete isola
tion of part IV, we too must leave the comforts of fancy
behind and actualize the learning processes of the secondary
imagination. There the mariner is completely alone, the
crew dead, "Alone alone, all, all alone / Alone on a wide
32
wide sea!" And this isolation has two results. First,
we are drawn totally inward; the experience of action, of
trying to impress our consciousness on things external to
us (the killing of the albatross: object) has the effect of
turning all of our psychic resources in upon ourselves
(subject). This reflexive phenomenon of the act of percep
tion is what the phenomenologists (particularly Husserl and
Ponty) call the "beginning" of philosophy; i.e., the quality
of essence (meaning) begins to disclose itself only when an
act of perception is directed willfully outward to an object
(what Tillich calls the courage that results in being: "The
33
courage to be") and then is totally internalized in the
subject of the individual psyche. Haven writes that both
the receptive reader and the mariner "leave the world of
ordinary experience to discover extremes of agony and
, 185
ecstasy. This mental voyage does not take place in space
34
and time but rather moves out of it." The "ordinary
experience" we relinquish is the world of comfortable, but
35
arbitrary order, the world of "fixities and definites" by
which Coleridge characterizes the fancy. What we enter is
the diffusive and chaotic interior (subjective) universe of
the secondary imagination, literally outside of space and
time because all that matters is the suffering and joy by
which, in all space and in all time, we "recreate" a self,
but in this instance not a self in need of the "objective"
systems and dogmas of fancy; rather one capable of strength
and growth and spiritual evolution, Unlike the realist/
empiricist who looks to experience only to categorize it and
make it comfortable, the mariner, Haven says, uses his
experience to discover that
. . . there is another dimension than time and space,
a dimension in which the boundaries between subject
and object, between 1^ and it are not fixed but fluid
. . . the poem begins and ends in time (though we
do not know exactly when). But at the center of
the poem, time and space cease to be essential
coordinates. The ship is static in a boundless
sea unmoved by wave or wind. The days of the
Mariner's ordeal are numbered, but by that oldest
of "mystic" numbers, seven, which is qualitatively
suggestive rather than temporally definitive. The
world of time and space is the world of ordinary
consciousness, at least for modern/Western man. It
is our way of locating things and selves in rela
tion to each other, and it underlies our definitions
of those things and selves. The Mariner does not
IFF
go from this place to that place, from this time
to that time. What changes is not his location
but his relation to the world around him, the
structure, so to speak, of his experience.^
As Haven implies, the experiences of the secondary
imagination are "qualitatively suggestive"; the suffering
and diffusion do not occur in a vacuum but in the context of
a search for meaning which is not yet conscious to the
individual psyche. The mariner experiences in part IV of
the Rime an "agony of soul" which "never a saint took pity
on."^ He experiences the complete absence of meaning (of
the saints, of God) and sees the total "dissipation" of his
"real" world:
I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men l a y . 38
And in his suffering he cannot perceive the "echo" of that
"infinite I AM" which is the stirring of the primary imagi
nation beyond the agony: the subject is not yet conscious
of the object within:
I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht
A wicked whisper came, and ande
My heart as dry as dust . . .
3 9
And yet I could die.
And to the wedding guest he says, "So lonely 1twas, that
4 0
God himself. / Scarce seemed there to be."
TB7
Coleridge suggests that when there are no fancies
to cling to we "suffer" the dissolution of "reality" as we
have come to know it. We wish for literal death, but it
does not come, because in the "courage" of such suffering
we are already gaining the psychic strength that will alter
our perception and make our evolution possible. In the
mind of the mariner, this altering of perception occurs when
he can see the beauty of the phenomenal world even through
the eyes of his agony:
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
Oh happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare.^1
Then, having acquired the ability to stand in even-minded
consciousness without the benefit of fancy, the mariner,
through the secondary imagination in his mind, can make the
transition from "diffusion" to "re-creation," from the
experience of chaos and isolation to the "struggle to
42
idealize and to unify." That transitxon takes the form
of an "objective" act of love:
IF8
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware!
43
The self-same moment I could pray . . .
The mariner's first objective act of perception, the killing
of the albatross, resulted in the courage to "individualize"
himself, but it was nevertheless an act that began with
negation, a necessary but painful assertion of his inde
pendence from the fancies of his shipmates. Now, with the
ability to stand alone in the pain of the absence of order
and meaning and still to act out love, the mariner has
"learned" the lessons of the secondary imagination; in
learning to love the "object" rather than to hate it or deny
it, he has begun the process of "constructive" reconcilia
tion of subject and object which results in Coleridge's two
44
forces of one power, which evoke transcendental understand
ing in that mental "intermundium" between "thought and
reality" where the man of absolute genius lives and has his
oeing. As Richard Haven has already suggested, Coleridge
transports us to "a dimension in which the boundaries
aetween subject and object, between ] C and it: are not fixed
aut fluid.
In parts V-VII of the Rime, Coleridge provides a
'plot" for the reconciliation of subject and object "in the
189
A 6
living power and prime agent of all human perception"
which is the primary imagination. The images are all of
integration: the mariner sleeps and the internalized "dew"
of his resting, dreaming consciousness merges with the
external rain that refreshes and awakens the objective
world:
Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.
The silly buckets on the deck,
That had so long remained,
I dreamt that they were filled with dew;
And when I awoke, it rained.^
M l things become possible in this state of renewal that
seems to merge the "finite mind" with the "eternal act of
4 8
creation in the infinite I AM." The mariner feels as if
he has no body and at the same time his ghostly crew seems
to regain a corporeal life of its own. Then the ship is
suddenly propelled from its becalmed state by a gust of
ivind that comes from no "natural" weather and the mariner
falls into a visionary swoon where the "story" of primary
imagaination takes place:
The ship . . .
Then like a pawing horse let go,
She made a sudden bound:
It flung the blood into my head,
And I fell down in a swound
190
. . . ere my living life returned,
I heard and in my soul discerned
Two voices in the air.^
Part VI of the Rime begins with the conversation of
two angelic "voices," one "who loved the bird that loved
the man," the other who loved the man who had to endure the
50
consequences of his actions. The voices which the mariner
"discerns" in his soul serve to integrate his learning
experiences from the act of subjective will to the act of
objective love. The result of such an understanding, Cole
ridge says, is the transcendental experience, "the driving
51
northward faster than human life could endure." Only the
mariner in his trance is allowed the vision of cosmic
reconciliation; "normal" human states of consciousness could
not endure it. And the ship of soul speeds beyond itself
to understand and learn the vision it must teach. When the
mariner awakes, he is like one of Plato's philosopher kings
who have seen the sun which brings the light which casts the
52
shadows which are reflected on the walls of the caves; and
le senses the burden of the responsibility which is his:
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread, . . .
But soon there breathed a wind on me
Nor sound nor motion made:
Its path was not upon the sea,
In ripple or in shade
. rgrT
It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek
Like a meadow-gale of spring—
It mingled strangely with my fears,
Yet it felt like a welcoming.
Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sailed softly too:
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze—
On me alone it b l e w . 53
The vision is a new and welcome "reality" born of the
regeneration of spring; but its demands are great, and those
who see "the representation in the finite mind of the
54
eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM," suffer
under its mission of teaching even while they are healed and
transformed by the gentle breeze of transcendental under
standing that blows on them alone.
In Part VII of the Rime, Coleridge explains, by the
use of symbols, the teaching mission of the mariner. As he
comes back "home" from his odyssey, he is approached by a
pilot, a pilot's boy, and a Hermit who "save" him from his
vessel which now sinks. The mariner, having found his
"I-ship," his soul, no longer needs a ship to objectify it.
He is his soul complete with primary objective understanding
and secondary subjective experience, but he is also the
wandering prophet and for that mission he needs the guidance
of those other more evolved dimensions, "the blessed troop
of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the
TF2
55
guardian saint." Those guiding spirits, which appear
first in part V, continue their protection when the mariner
reaches "home." The pilot and his boat and his boy repre
sent the mariner's return to the material world; until one
becomes like unto the gods themselves, one may not stay in
the realms of transcendental reality, and as the voice of
one of the angels says, the mariner "hath penance done, and
penance more will do,"^ not for the killing of the alba
tross but for the "constructive" purpose of becoming ulti
mately one who does not have to return "home" to this dimen
sion at all. The pilot thus guides the mariner back into
the "reality" where he must do his work. The Hermit repre
sents the spiritual guidance which will always be with the
mariner as he tells his tale and as he selects those who
must hear it. It is the Hermit who in a sense commissions
the mariner:
"0 shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!"
The Hermit crossed his brow.
"Say quick," quoth he, "I bid thee say
What manner of man art thou?"^
George Whalley says there is no "moral" to this
5 8
Rime, but surely there is a moral if one takes the Hermit
Literally. The mariner is absolved and he is blessed; and
le is told, not to preach a dogma (whether of penance or of
righteousness), but to "say" what manner of man he is I He
T93
is a mariner who emerges as Coleridge's man of absolute
genius whose "moral" is implicit in the learning process he
represents. The mariner is Coleridge's symbolic representa
tion of the philosophical and psychological integration and
evolution he sees for all men willing to make the difficult
descent with him into the cave of "Trophonius." Haven
correctly understands Coleridge's philosophic and poetic
integration when he says that Coleridge conceived of
. . . Reason in the highest sense, as a faculty of
mystical insight . . . which is not merely a
vague will to believe, but a recognizable kind of
experience . . . from which it is possible to
examine the philosophy not as a more or less
incoherent and derivative system, but as a symbol
ic projection of such experience. And this in
turn would suggest . . . that the language and
symbols of philosophy come to serve some of the
same functions . . . as the language and symbols
of poetry.^9
The mariner is such a projection of Coleridge's philosophy,
one who chooses to act both for himself and for the love of
an object, and finally he comes to act for the education of
others. His learning process, suggested in the Rime,
anticipates a phenomenology of transcendental philosophy.
To find the essence that rests in the "intermundium" between
"thought and reality" we must learn, as does the mariner, to
embark on a journey that will challenge our fancies and
plummet us to the depths of our psychic resources, from
194
which isolation and suffering alone, the visionary experi
ence can ascertain. Following such a process of learning,
we are open to the "spots of time" that renew us and remind
us of the transcendental understanding which is ours; and
we are guided to further learning by our recollections in
tranquility (subject) and by the whispers of the Hermit holy
man who tells us to account for who we are by the story
(object) of human evolution we have come to represent:
I pass like night from land to land
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me;
To him my tale I teach.^0
Only when we fulfill the mission of healing and teaching
are we "left free" to learn ourselves and, like the mariner,
able
To walk together to the kirk,
And all together pray
While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends
And youths and maidens gay . . .
which is, as Haven says, "to discover the depths of the
f i * ?
self . . . in relation to the universe and to 'God.'"
Footnotes
^Mayer Howard Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New
York: Norton, 1971), p. 171.
2Ibid., p. 172.
3
Richard Haven, Patterns of Consciousness: An Essay
on Coleridge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1969), p. 18.
^Ibid., p. 18. ^Ibid., p. 19.
8Ibid., p. 17.
■7
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (New
York: Dutton, 1906), p. 85.
8Ibid., p. 17.
^Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner (New York: Avon, 1967), p. 123.
■^J. Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1927), p. 277.
^^Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 275.
12E. M. W. Tillyard, "Coleridge, The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner," in Master Poems of the English Language,
ed. 0. Williams (New York: Trident, 1966) , pp. 486-87/
13
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 138.
^Coleridge, Mariner, p. 27.
15Ibid., p. 23. 18Ibid., p. 129.
17Ibid., p. 23. 18Ibid., p. 25.
_____________________________LSL5___________________________
19Ibid.
2 0
Haven, Patterns of Consciousness, pp. 29-30.
21
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 17.
22Ibid.
2 3
George Whalley, "The Mariner and the Albatross,"
in Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, ed. James D. Boulger (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), p. 85.
24
Maud Bodkin, "Views," in Twentieth Century Inter
pretations of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ed. James
T96I
D. Boulger, (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1969), pp. 113-16.
25
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 71.
2
Coleridge, Mariner, p. 39.
27Ibid.
2 8
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 127.
2 Q
Max F. Schulz, The Poetic Voices of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963),
. 56.
30
Coleridge, Mariner, p. 43.
31
Haven, Patterns of Consciousness, p. 27.
3 2
Coleridge, Mariner, p. 63.
3 3
Edmund Husserl, Ideas (London: Collier-Macmillan,
Ltd., 1931) ; and Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven:
Zale University Press, 1952), pp. 81-82.
24Haven, Patterns of Consciousness, p. 20.
3 S
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 167.
3 6
Husserl, Patterns of Consciousness, p. 20.
197
37
Coleridge, Mariner, p. 63.
38 39
Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., pp. 65, 69.
40 41
Ibid., p. 125. Ibxd., pp. 72, 75.
42
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 167.
43Coleridge, Mariner, pp. 76-77.
44
Colerxdge, Bxographia, pp. 163-64.
45
Haven, Patterns of Consciousness, p. 20.
46
Colerxdge, Bxographxa, p. 167.
47
Colerxdge, Marxner, p. 79.
48
Colerxdge, Bxographxa, p. 167.
49
Colerxdge, Marxner, p. 95.
50 51
Ibxd., p. 97. Ibxd., p. 99.
52
W. T. Jones, The Classical Mxnd (New York: Har-
sourt, Brace & World, 1952), pp. 135-38.
53
Colerxdge, Marxner, p. 107.
54
Coleridge, Biographia, p. 167.
55
Coleridge, Mariner, p. 187.
r /• n
Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 123.
33Whalley, "The Mariner," p. 79.
59
Haven, Patterns of Consciousness, p. 17.
60
Colerxdge, Mariner, p. 123.
61Ibid., p. 127.
^Haven, Patterns of Consciousness, p. 28.
198
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