University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Paradigms Of Phenomenology In Three Romantic Poets

(USC Thesis Other)

Paradigms Of Phenomenology In Three Romantic Poets

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content PARADIGMS OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN THREE ROMANTIC POETS by Gerald Charles Carter A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) June 1973 74-5851 CARTER, Gerald Charles, 1926- PARADICMS OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN THREE ROMANTIC POETS. University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1973 Language and Literature, modem University Microfilms, A X E R O X Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan © 1973 GERALD CHARLES CARTER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, written by ________ Geraid-.Charles-.Carter......... under the direction of Ms Dissertation Com mittee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Gradu ate School, in partial fulfillment of require ments of the degree of D O C TO R OF P H IL O S O P H Y Dean Date.. Jun.e^. . 1 . 9 . 7 3 . . . . DISSERTATION COMMITTEE ...... TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION: AFFINITIES AND ROOTS... ........... 1 II. PHENOMENOLOGICAL MODE VERSUS PLURALISTIC MANNER 26 III. EXISTENTIAL DUALITY AND COLERIDGE'S AESTHETIC . 48 IV. THE NECESSITY OF PARADOX................... 85 BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................. 112 APPENDIXES................................................ 119 ii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: AFFINITIES AND ROOTS To be a poet, said Shelley, "is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression."1 Here in a single brief statement the poet identifies and precipitates one of the central concepts that distinguish the English romantic movement from the tradition out of which it sprang. He establishes the important fact that at its core romanti cism is fundamentally relational in terms of man, his art, and his world; and that the apprehension of these relation ships (actually correlational) opens avenues toward the per ception of essential truths. As Earl R. Wasserman says: What Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley chose to confront more centrally and to a degree unprecedented in English literature is . . . : How do subject and object meet in a meaningful relationship? By what means do we have a significant awareness of the world?2 In other words, the primary focus of the romantic movement XA Defence of Poetry, in Complete Works of Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London, 1934), p . Ill. 2"The English Romantics: The Grounds of Knowledge," in Studies in Romanticism, IV (1964), 21. 1 is at once epistemological and ultimately ontological. It is peculiarly appropriate that Shelley's seminal pronouncement should occur in A Defence of Poetry, a work which has been both praised as "one of the most penetrating general discussions of poetry we have,"3 and disparaged for the seeming obscurity created by its occasionally elaborate ly figurative flights of rhetoric.1 * That both opinions can be justified helps underscore the major theme of this study: The English romantic poets, notably individualistic as they were, shared— with significant but relatively minor varia tions— an apperception of a radically new aesthetic which, expressed in the metaphorical language of poetry (and poetic prose), has manifested itself in tantalyzing flashes only, while its full scope and homogeneity have to a considerable extent remained elusive. But if the sweep and homology of the romantic movement have continued to evade precise definition despite the gen eral recognition of a certain community of outlook among its major poets (at least since Ren# Wellek's able defence against Lovejoy in 1949s), one reason is undoubtedly what Walter Jackson Bate has called a "temptation . . . to 3Andrew Bradley, "Shelley's View of Poetry," Oxford Lectures on the English Poets (London, 1909), p. 152. 4David Perkins, English Romantic Writers (New York, 1967), headnote, p. 107. s"The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History," in Comparative Literature, I (1949), 1-172. 3 concentrate too exclusively on source hunting."6 For one thing, the sources are so many and so various that they as often confuse as clarify what the romantics derived from them. And for another, seeking to describe what these writers accomplished purely in terms of their sources must always fall short of the reality because, as he goes on, it would be a mistake to assume that if Coleridge took over a particular term or idea from Kant, for example, we have then only to turn to Kant for the explanation of what Coleridge was trying to say on this subject.7 This is not to say, of course, that the intensive study of its sources does not provide invaluable insights into the nature and even direction of romanticism. The movement must certainly be accepted as being at one level both an out growth of and a revolt from its historical backgrounds, and we shall need to treat of these in due course. But the achievement of the English romantic poets is much more than the sum of its parts, historical or otherwise. To quote again from Bate— and what he says of Coleridge is true also of other major figures in varying degrees— actually, he tended to take over terms and concepts from others because they seemed, for the time being, to help fill out or to fit in with more general ideas of his own— ideas that were quite different, in some cases, from those of the original writer.8 Which is another way of saying that fuller comprehension of 6"Romantic Transcendentalism, and the Organic View of Nature," in Criticism: the Major Texts (New York, 1952), p. 358. 7Ibid. 8Bate, 358-359. the romantics now requires that we turn more of our atten tion toward a closer examination of the metaphysical struc tures and assumptions they evolved from the raw material their sources provided. It is our contention that if we seek the closest paral lels between romantic thought on the one hand and philo sophical principle on the other, we discover with some sur prise that these are to be found not in the eighteenth cen tury or earlier, but in our own. Or to be more precise, it is the purpose of this study to explore the proposition that the radical romantic insight, of which Shelley's aphorism is a clear summary, is essentially phenomenological in charac ter9 (anticipating the systematic philosophical organization of phenomenological theory by Edmund Husserl and his follow ers by about a century10). Viewed from this premise roman tic literature is open to a more penetrating and integrated investigation than has been hitherto possible; is conducive of a more thorough appreciation of its aims, its nature, and its continuing value, through the application of the princi- 9As used throughout this study the term "phenomenol ogy" is essentially an abbreviation of "existential phenom enology" as defined by William A. Luijpen, Existential Phe nomenology (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1960). 10Husserl published his earliest work of a substan tially phenomenological character, "Prolegomena to Pure Logic," Logische Untersuchungen, in 1900. He was not the first to make use of the term, Hegel having published a work entitled Phenomenology of the Spirit, in 1807, but this was not a formal or systematic attempt to define or structure a philosophical principle. pies and methods of philosophical phenomenology as a descriptive model.11 • But it must be emphasized at once that the identifica tion of romantic thought as being basically phenomenological although precursive of philosophical phenomenology, is not meant in any way to imply that the romantics "invented" phe nomenology. Or even less that philosophers later appropri ated— or were even aware of--romantic concepts in their exposition of phenomenological theory. Nor is it intended to suggest that the metaphysical notions of any romantic poet singly, nor all of them together, comprise a fully fledged phenomenology. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that to a greater or lesser degree, and in a more or less rudimentary form, attitudes and concepts closely analogous to the basic features of phenomenology (as outlined below) are expressed in the works of these writers, and that they define a posture which has tended to appear ambiguous and confusing when seen from other points of view. Seen as aspects of a shared metaphysic, however, much of the ambiguity dissolves and a coherent if fluctuating pattern emerges. It should also be borne in mind that the ontologi cal and epistemological position which is today broadly defined by "phenomenology" is not so much the creation of 11 Appendix B provides a short discussion of the ele ments of phenomenological method as these are applied here in. For a full-length explicitation, cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London, 1931) . 6 any individual or group as it is a series of conclusions developing organically from an accretion of responses to rather widely held beliefs. And this radically organic principle at work within phenomenological thought will be shown to be closely similar to what Thomas McFarland has said is in Coleridge, an "intrinsically organic quality."12 He goes on to warn of the misconceptions that can arise if we become diverted by the obvious eclecticism of the roman tic's sources, pointing out that this breadth of background is in fact organized by an essential intellectual position, for we should become more aware of the organically interfused quality of his learning, and from that awareness we may possibly be able to penetrate to the great central ideas at the heart of the organism.1 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty has written that "phenomenology can be practiced and identified as a manner or style of think ing, n1 * * and it is in this elemental kind of way that roman tic thought is phenomenological. He adds "that it existed as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of it self as a philosophy."15 The distinction we claim for the romantic poets in this study is that they were early part of such a movement; that they were in fact the first generation 12Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (London, 1969), p . xxix. 13Ibid. 1 ‘ 'Phenomenology of Perception (New York, 1962) , viii. 15Ibid. of writers to actively seek the transmutation of an intui tional phenomenology into esthetic theory and practice. William A. Luijpen remarks in the Introduction to Exis tential Phenomenology1 6 that "when a book title mentions the terms 'phenomenology' or 'existentialism,1 the reader may expect almost anything in its pages" (1). The reason for this is that phenomenology remains incomplete as a philo sophical structure because: one, the research of its founder, Edmund Husserl, was unfinished at the time of his death in 1938;1 7 two, much of his writing still awaits pub lication;1 8 three, language imposes limitations on the expression of a totally inclusive metaphysics such as phe nomenology, and segments of Husserl's thought are yet to be integrated into the whole; four, phenomenological theory is of its nature essentially open-ended and ongoing, and there fore defies definitive synthesis; five, systematic phenome nology is still very new and undergoing evolutionary change in the search for more complete formulation; and lastly, for all these causes it continues to be refined and molded by a 16(Pittsburgh, Pa., 1960). 1 7He was still at work on the-, second part of Krisis when he succumbed to pleurisy (cf. Joseph J. Kockelmans, Introduction to "Life-World and World-Experiencing Life," in Phenomenology, ed. Kockelmans (New York, 1967), p. 194. 18"According to those in a position to know, the bulk of Husserl's philosophy lies not in his published work but in his literary remains"; Dorion Cairns, "Some Results of Husserl's Investigations," in The Journal of Philosophy, XXXVI (1939), 236. i........................ 8: host of creative thinkers. In one sense, then, at this juncture it may even be said with truth that there are not one but several phenomenological philosophies extant, and any attempt to discuss phenomenological traits is both pre mature and presumptuous. Nonetheless, as Luijpen says, there exists "a certain unity of 'movement' or 'climate,' no matter how great the differences may be between the explicit theses of existentialists and phenomenologists"9 there are basic features which, although subject to differing emphases in the hands of individual thinkers, are constants in all phenomenological theory to the extent that their variation is one of degree and not of kind. Among these are the char acteristics we shall identify and comment upon in the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, and which are known to present-day phenomenologists as intentionality, epokhe (or "transcendental reduction"), noesis and noema, essence, and the infinity of possible perspectives which together constitute horizon. These form the indispensable structural framework of phenomenological theory. If we are careful and consistent in our own usage, the current tendency to bandy these words about as vaguely authoritative makeweights or as synonyms for any number of amorphous abstruse concepts need not denigrate their usefulness; rather it can point up their newly discovered significance. Certainly the insights they describe are acutely germane to any consideration of the 1 9Existential Phenomenology, p. 1. place or function of art in our society; indispensable to any current aesthetic dialectic. These and other technical terms as they are used in this analysis are defined in some detail in appendixes;20 it is sufficient to note at this point that the definitions follow closely on those estab lished in the works of Husserl,21 and as they developed in those of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and a number of recent commentators.22 Also related to the general question of the scope and method of this study, no attempt will be made here to inter pret phenomenological philosophy, or the romantic texts either, excepting insofar as this is absolutely unavoidable in the interests of clarity and compression to paraphrase the context of certain quotations. There are several reasons for this, not the least being that interpretation offends against a basic phenomenological precept that 20Appendix A provides a condensed discussion of some of the major aims and assertions of philosophical phenomenol ogy. For a more detailed explicitation, cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideas, or Joseph J. Kockelmans, ed., Phenomenology: The PhTl'osophy of Edmund Husserl and Its 'interpretation (New York, 1967). For Appendix B, cf. note ll above. 21 Particularly in Ideas, but also in Cartesian Medita tions, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, 1969), and Phenome nology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York, 1965) . 22Reliance for explicitation of Husserl's published texts, and for establishing essential coherence within phe nomenological theory is basically centered upon William A. Luijpen, Existential Phenomenology (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1960), Phenomenology and Existentialism, eds. Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum (Baltimore,' Md. , 196 7) , and Phenomenol ogy : The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpreta tion (New York. 1967) . analysis be descriptive only; another, this is a literary study, concerned with philosophy only as it has bearing on the principal matter in hand; a third, the work has already been done by qualified commentators.23 Thus we depend upon cogent passages quoted from the works of recognized scholars in the field of explicitation of Husserl's sometimes ab struse texts and other technical material. But perhaps most importantly, we believe the validity and strength of the position outlined in this study to rest primarily upon what we take to be a fact: a direct comparison of the texts, romantic and phenomenological, clearly shows close affini ties to exist between them— at several levels— in matters of origin, language, purpose, method of procedure, in a few cases even in the mode of illustration, and most of all in their essential existential view of man. It is a generally recognized truism that any critical statement is an assertion, or at least an assumption, of a philosophical position. Similarly, any work of art and especially any work of literature, exhibits in some degree the metaphysical predilections of its creator. Whereas in the romantic movement, art and philosophy, creativity and criticism, are but alternate perspectives of the same con cepts, so intimately interrelated as to be virtually insep arable without emasculation of one or the other or both, the 2 Particularly by Luijpen, whose monumental Existential Phenomenology brings together the thought of some one hun- dred seventyscholars in a very complete synthesis. 11 need to clearly identify the philosophical foundations is an essential first step toward comprehension of the artistic structures erected upon them. The glittering pinnacles of romantic literary achievement, like those of an iceberg, remain enigmatic excepting as the manifest tips of submerged ontologies. Or as A. N. Whitehead has it: That [art] which endures is limited, obstructive, intol erant, infecting its environment with its own aspects. But it is not self-sufficient. . . . It is only itself as drawing together into its own limitations the larger whole in which it finds itself.2 At the same time the dangers inherent in literary analyses based upon philosophical perspectives are only too apparent. To the extent that these are criteria extrinsic to literature they are prone to a discouraging tendency to degenerate into hobby-horses ridden roughshod over literary works in search of support for a priori standpoints. Or they become procrustean beds which works are stretched or lopped to fit. Or they become reductive to the point of threatening the extinction of literature itself.25 And the use of a philosophical structure as critical yardstick, how ever flexible, is at least potentially susceptible to any or all of these failings. Typically such a criterion may be too broad or too nar row. If too broad it may reduce literature to a supporting zlt"The Romantic Reaction," in Science and the Modern World (New York, 1928), p. 137. 25For example, cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Litera- ture? (New York, 1949), pp. 9-13. 12 role bolstering some cosmic principle, a charge laid at Coleridge by Hazlitt.26 In any event it will ordinarily be extrinsic to literature except incidentally, and may actually be grounded in assumptions antithetical to certain works, and/or even to the dynamics of literature as a whole.27 If it is too narrow it will prove to be inadequate or restrictive as a criterion, prone to concentrating atten tion upon aspects of content to the detriment of other ele ments, with consequent distortion of apparent form. Never theless, bearing these potential limitations and possible hazards in mind, there appear to be unusually sound reasons why a phenomenologically oriented analysis recommends itself for the study of the English romantic poets and their work. Always provided, as M. H. Abrams writes, it avoids imposing its own philosophy, by utilizing those key distinctions which are already common to the largest pos sible number of the theories to be compared, and then to apply the scheme warily, in constant readiness to intro duce such further distinctions as seem to be needed for the purpose in hand.28 Everything else aside, phenomenological method express ly prohibits appeal to a priori criteria, and in this respect is considerably less cramping than most critical 28"In writing verse he is trying to subject the Muse to transcendenta1 theories," from "Mr. Coleridge," in The Spirit of the~Age. 27cf. Thomas Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments (Aalen, Ger., 1962). 28The Mirror and the Lamp (London, 1953), p. 6. 13 approaches.29 Furthermore, since phenomenological analysis implicitly seeks the eventual description of every possible perspective (actual, hypothetical, conceivable, etc.) perti nent to a given phenomenon, no valid critical aspect is excluded or can be ignored. On the contrary, thorough phe nomenological analysis must actively endeavor to include all critical data, eschewing claims to definitiveness in con sciously anticipating additional future perspectives. Thus commitment to phenomenological method can no more inhibit adequate examination of a work's inner organization than it can focus inappropriately upon it to the exclusion of other cogent aspects. As in Gestalt psychology, in phenomenologi cal analysis all perspectives are significant in helping define total horizon.30 But these are general qualifica tions; there are more specific reasons recommending phenome nological study of the romantics. Most importantly phenomenology will be shown to be not extrinsic to romanticism, but the best possible definition of its raison d'dtre. As has been noted above the romantic movement is permeated with philosophical considerations at every point, and the question is no longer whether these can 2 9Cf. Ideas, "Part Three, Procedure of Pure Phenomenol ogy in Respect of Methods and Problems," pp. 171-375. 30The notion of an infinitely regressive "horizon" or consciousness in time and space is continuously present to phenomenology. It is the special subject of discourse in Ideas, sections 27 and 28, pp. 91-9 4, and in section 82, pfT. 218-219. 14 be safely ignored, but where can be found an adequate van tage from which they can be clearly seen and understood. That philosophical phenomenology provides such a position is apparent if we compare, for example, Keats': "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"31 with Martin Heidegger's statement that the appearance of truth in the work of art is beauty; and beauty is one of the essential ways in which truth comes to be. 32 It is important to note that what sounds like a shared Pla tonism here is in fact something very different. Although both Keats and Heidegger express an implicit acceptance of truth and beauty as absolutes, and to this extent share with Plato an idealistic view of a "world of ideas," for the poet and the phenomenologist immutable ideas are conceivable by man-in-the-world, not brought with him from "a mysterious previous state,"33 in the phrase of Luijpens, who goes on to say: Such a mythical explanation is superfluous. There is a world of ideas, but this world is not subsistent. The world of ideas is produced by me and my world. . . . I seize what they are and fix this in my concepts. Accordingly, immutable concepts are the expression of the essence of reality. 31* And it is as a key to reality (the world of perception) that 31Poems, ed. de Selincourt (London, 1970), p. 135. 32Translation by E . F. Kaelin, "Notes toward an Under standing of Heidegger's Aesthetics," in Phenomenology and Existentialism, eds. Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum (Baltimore, Md., 1967), p. 85. 33Luijpen, p. 121. 3l*Ibid. 15 Keats sees the immutable relationship between "beauty" and "truth." He writes in a letter to his brothers George and Tom: The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.35 This passage has been paraphrased by Walter Jackson Bate to read: If the imaginative grasp of an object is sufficiently in tense, it takes so strong a hold of the mind that . . . its truth (or character) then "swells into reality" for us so vividly that the dynamic awareness of it is also "beautiful." In other words, reality taking form and meaning is "beauty" if it is vitally enough known and felt.35 Other instances of close analogies between romantic state ment and phenomenological description could be cited, but the full extent of romantic affinity for the phenomenologi cal attitude will appear as this study progresses. The primary locus of the close analogy existing between English romantic thought and philosophical phenomenology is to be found in their common roots. The architects of theory in each area, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edmund Husserl, have both identified the "primitive fact" behind their . . L - philosophical ideas as lying in the speculative meditations 35#32 December 21-27, 1817, Letters, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Harvard, 1958), p. 192. 36Major British Writers, enlarged edition, 1959 (New York), p. 360n. 16 of Rend1 Descartes (1596-1650).37 In his Discourse on Method Descartes published the results of his attempt to define that which is unqualifiedly actual. Systematically suspend ing judgment on (i.e., doubting) the existential validity of each item of his knowledge^ and perception in turn, he reduced the incontestible universe to a single entity: his own consciousness. He crystallized his conclusion in one crisp aphorism: "Cogito, ergo sum," which reshaped man's conceptual world from a divinely engineered unity into a subjectively perceived dualism. Unwittingly Descartes' definition spawned one of the great philosophical contro versies of all time, echoes of which continue to endure even into our own day. Having identified the consciousness of the thinker as the sole indubitable existent— and therefore distinctive from all other phenomena including the physical and sensuous self of the thinker— the questions of how to describe the peculiar nature of this consciousness, and per haps more importantly that of defining its relationships with the rest of the cosmos, became preeminent philosophical problems. But for Descartes the distinction of conscious ness from the material world was only a means, not the pur pose of his speculations. His main interest remained "to demonstrate the solidity of the physical sciences,"38 and 37Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London, 1956), pT 74 (all further references to B.L. will be to this edition), and Cartesian Meditations, p. 1. 38Luijpen, p. 83. 17 unaware of the vast potential significance of his defini tion, or at least unconcerned with it, he left it to others to work out its implications.39 For consciousness is most clearly separated from the material world by its inherent immateriality. The problem then being: How is immaterial consciousness able to register images of, and ideas about, objective reality? Some kind of mediation would seem to be called for, but this merely leaves open the further ques tion: Of what kind? for it would appear that the mediator would need to share the qualities of both. Two groups of theories sprang up in response to the challenge of these problems. The one grew out of the suppo sition that matter is the irreducible reality and conscious ness a sort of aberration; the other from the conviction that the roles were more or less reversed. The most signif icant point is that neither side contested the central dual ism of mind and matter proposed by Descartes. Thus, al though the controversy was prolonged and in some cases bit ter, because the basic assumption of a radical dualism was shared the lines of battle are often confused and difficult to discriminate. There were as many shades of opinion on both sides as there were theorists, and men who were pas sionately opposed on general principles sometimes found themselves in uneasy proximity on specifics, or vice versa. David Hume, for example, who rejected out of hand Berkeley's 39Luijpen, p. 84, and Cartesian Meditations, pp. 24-25. 18 ' theory of mediation by divine intervention, was as much at odds with mechanistic hypotheses like Hartley's "associa- tionism" as was the good bishop himself. No two absolutely agreed or disagreed with each other in all respects, and the attempt to make clearcut distinctions between them is conse quently necessarily arbitrary. But distinction there was, and the traditional labels "empiricist" and "idealist" will serve as well as any, without imposing drastic oversimpli fication or distortion. The essence of Descartes1 explicitation of the cogito lies in its differentiation from the world which contains it. Both empiricist and idealist positions begin here, their divergency depending upon the vehicle of mediation to which they attribute the "appearance" within consciousness (in the form of images or ideas) of concepts of a universe which is outside of consciousness. According to general empiricist theory consciousness is a quality peculiar to a certain class of material (human) bodies in a material world. Impressions of this world are imposed upon con sciousness, isolated in its immateriality, through the direct agency of the senses and some mediating organiza tion.1 *0 The theories of Locke, Hobbes, and Hartley in England typify both the unity and the diversity existing among those whose attitudes are generally empiricist— in the 1,0Aron Gurwitsch, "Intentionality, Constitution, and Intentional Analysis," in Phenomenology, ed. Kockelmans, p . 34. 19 sense in which the term is being used here— differing from each other mainly in how they account for the apparatus by means of which sense data are said to be translated into impressions made upon admittedly impalpable consciousness. The idealists sidestepped this particular problem, declaring that since consciousness is in some way a spiri tual entity, it is patently incapable of experiencing any empirical knowledge of the material world (supposing there to be such a thing). Therefore, the images and ideas aris ing within consciousness are either naturally immanent (Hume), or due to divine revelation (Berkeley). In Germany Immanuel Kant made a supreme effort to bridge the gap between these extreme positions, but failed to establish the ground for a fresh dialectic. Essentially idealistic in his sympathies, he sought to show in A Critique of Pure Reason that at least the ethical processes of consciousness can be defined in rational terms. But he hedged on the key question of man's knowledge of objective reality, concluding that we cannot know "things-in-them selves," only their appearance as rationally compared with a scale of a priori criteria. It will be apparent that the empiricists conceived of an autonomous material reality, "an inhuman world, in the sense that man and his perceiving consciousness are left out of it," 41 according to William A. Luijpen, who goes on to 41Luijpen, p. 85. 20 say that within this theoretical framework, consciousness has to be conceived as pure passivity, as tabula rasa, a sheet of paper on which nothing is written, a sensitive photographic plate, a mirror, on which a world that is fully in-itself imprints itself. Empiricism first affirms a world that is not the term of the encounter that knowl edge is and next asserts that consciousness undergoes the influence of reality in a fully passive sense. The world is the totality of reality, purely a spectacle for con- sciousness, which in a "surveying glance" (Merleau-Ponty) watches the world without any standpoint, without being a determined situation, without being itself involved in this world. (85-86) For idealists, on the other hand, it was consciousness which is independent, and so "reality dissolved more and more into thin air" (86). Idealism considered it its task . . . to eliminate the world entirely as a source of knowledge. It views the perception of the world by consciousness with its conse quent obscurity and confusedness as an imperfect form of knowledge, which must be overcome and replaced by the clarity of the self-sufficient idea . . . Consciousness has as its task to return to itself, to conquer its estrangement from itself in matter. Once this return is made, consciousness is sufficient unto itself, pure for- itselfness, capable of perfect reflection (Hegel). (85) It is apparent, therefore, that despite the vigor and tenac ity of their theoretical opposition, empiricists and ideal ists both effectively isolated man as consciousness from the world, reducing him to the role of a passive receptor of mediated mental images. It is true empiricists thought these images probably closely mirrored material phenomena, while idealists recognized no necessary or demonstrable co herence between image and objective reality, but in either case the net result was a concept of man robbed of his existential significance. 21 "To these whirlwinds of eighteenth-century epistemol- °gy," writes Wasserman, "the poets [of the period], out wardly, remained rather indifferent."42 One heritage of the romantics, then, was a deal of revolutionary epistemological speculation and a literary tradition to which these speculations should have been important, but were not. 3 The romantic poets, their sense of philosophical estrange ment aggravated, perhaps, by the rapid collapse of humanis tic forces in revolutionary France and the depression of a dispossessed agrarian population in industrializing England, sought a fresh ground upon which to reestablish human dig nity, purpose, and artistic integrity.44 Wasserman notes that each of these poets offers a different answer, and each is unique as poet in proportion as his answer is special; but all share the necessity to resolve the question their predecessors had made so pressing through philosophic and aesthetic concern and poetic neglect or incompetence.45 The point being that once the conscious mind is accepted as being nothing but a receptor and reflector of ready-made images the artist's position is denigrated to that of an empty or passive vessel, temporarily "possessed" in the Pla tonic sense during periods of composition. The tradition ally privileged status of the poet as "maker" or "seer" is 42Studies in Romanticism, p. 19. 4 3Studies, p. 21. 44Ernest de Selincourt, ed. Introduction to William Wordsworth, The Prelude. 45Studies, p. 21. 22 acutely undermined, his art no longer truly his. It had become necessary, in the words of Abrams, to attempt to overcome the sense of man's alienation from the world by healing the cleavage between subject and object, between the vital, purposeful, value-full world of private experience and the dead postulated world of extension, quantity, and motion. To establish that man shares his own life with nature was to reanimate the dead world of the materialists, and at the same time most effectively to tie man back into his milieu. 46 At the core of the romantic attempt to reestablish man within his world lay the belief that the universe he per ceives is at least partly the mental creation of man him self. This is the basic shift in outlook that Abrams repre sents as a movement from a concept of mind as mirror to that of it as a lamp.47 He says that the analogies for the mind in the writings of both Words worth and Coleridge show a radical transformation. Varied as these are, they usually agree in picturing the mind as active rather than inertly receptive, and as contributing to the world in the very process of perceiving the world.48 But unlike other subjectivist theories before and since, this one was seen by its progenitors as not leading toward conceptual anarchy, but toward recognition of a universal unity. Such a unity also forms an intuitional focus of phe nomenological theory: Can the unity of a whole be other than made one through the essential proper nature of its parts, which must 46The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 65. 4 7Explored particularly in "Changing Metaphors of Mind," in The Mirror and the Lamp. 4 8Mirror, p. 58. 23 therefore have some community of essence instead of a fundamental heterogeneity? 9 The later view differing from the earlier mainly in the more rigorous development of its logical rationale. Romantics and phenomenologists alike decry the divorce of man from his world as being not only destructive of man's most fundamental humanity, but also as being unjustified in terms of our "ordinary everyday experience";50 or what Husserl calls "the Thesis of the Natural Standpoint."51 And Coleridge goes so far as to say in Biographia Literaria that all men are born with "original and innate prejudices . . . [which] are all reducible to the one fundamental presumption that there exist things without us" (147). To be sure we may choose temporarily to abstract single aspects from the totality of experience to facilitate their closer study, much as Descartes "set aside" the phenomena of existence, but this must not be confused with the separation of con sciousness from the world. It is Coleridge again who • i . asserts: It is the table itself which the man of common sense believes himself to see, not the phantom of a table from which he may argumentatively deduce the reality of a table which he does not see. (148) Husserl is equally unambiguous; he writes in Ideas that "all doubting and rejecting of the data of the natural world **9Ideas, p. 114. 50Luijpen, p. 88. 51 Ideas, Part Two, particularly Chapter 3, sections 27 and 28. 24 leaves standing the general thesis of the natural stand point" (96). To which he later adds: It is . . . a fundamental error to suppose that perception (and every other type of the intuition of things, each after its own manner) fails to come in contact with the thing itself. (122) Coleridge, again like Husserl a century or so later, points out that existence as we de facto experience it occurs between the extremes of empiricism and idealism, and "let it be remembered 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" (148). Both are but parts of a whole which is infinitely greater than their sum. For although con sciousness is undeniably a unique form of being, it is implicitly consciousness of something other than itself; it is inherently subjective.52 And it has as its object mate riality, which "emerges" as phenomena (i.e., assumes value, takes on meaning) purely in response to acts of human per ception. Man and his world are existentially interdepen dent and correlational. Therefore, for both romantic poets and phenomenological philosophers, Cartesian dualism is to be replaced by a concept "essentially characterized by an intrinsic duality."53 With the romantics this new duality typically becomes expressed as the assertion of a radically fresh relationship existing between mind and nature. In the following pages the tenor and substance of 52Luijpen, pp. 112ff. 53Gurwitsch, p. 50. 25 romantic thought will be examined from the point of view of such key phenomenological concepts as this inherent duality, the recognition of the intentionality which underlies all acts of perception, apparent parallels between the romantic idea of innocence and the phenomenological notion of essence, the problem of antipathy of the subjective for the intersubjective components of existence, and the pervasive sense of unity in romanticism which today has assumed sub stantive form as syncretic thought. This latter will empha size the constant problems shared by poets and philosophers as they attempt to delineate and delimit specific perspec tives of a comprehensively inclusive world view, in which each is an inseparable aspect of a whole which is itself only completely explicable as the totality of all of them. In the words of Whitehead: In a certain sense everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.5* * Coleridge,-.Wordsworth, and Shelley have all been charged at one time or another with a lack of coherence in their thought. While the present study does not pretend to eliminate all the apparent ambiguities in romantic thought it is hoped that the identification of a phenomenological pattern of thinking, variously shared to some degree by these major figures, may go some way toward providing a fresh sense of order. 5 **Whitehead, p. 133. CHAPTER II PHENOMENOLOGICAL MODE VERSUS PLURALISTIC MANNER If it is possible to isolate a single general radical concept that most clearly distinguishes both the English romantic movement and modern phenomenological theory from their predecessors, it is that of the nature of creativity, and its close analogue, "intentionality.1 1 Although the romantic writers' chief concern is with creativity as it appears and functions in poetic composition, for romantics and phenomenologists alike, recognition of man's inherent ability to project meaning into his perceptual world is basic and substantive. Furthermore, this power is usually applied consciously, although the intensity of application will vary between individuals and on occasion. Which is to say, both groups share an implicitly subjective epistemology of a rather well-defined kind. Of course the concepts of "creativity" and "intention ality" are not identical, the one being at least suggestive of the human assumption of aspects of divinity,1 and the 1cf. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 42ff. 26 27 other referring most often— but by no means exclusively— to the agency of man at a more mundane level.2 Nonetheless, in definition and in function the two terms have much in com mon, particularly to the extent that both point at man's active participation in the shaping of his perceptual world. That they overlap much more than peripherally becomes clear if we compare statements made about them by significant com mentators. For example, Abrams writes that in eighteenth century theory, the minor topic of the way feelings may enter into and alter objects of sense had been discussed under the heading of "style" .... In the nineteenth century, this problem moves into a position at the very center of poetic theory.3 And although "feelings" may be misleading here, Abrams shows us that he means not raw emotions but thoughts about them. when he supports his contention by quoting Wordsworth's thesis that objects derive their influence not from what they actually are in themselves, but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by those objects.1 * And since it is the qualities and attributes of objects that 2Many phenomenologists are devout Christians who have expounded at length on their philosophy as a means to com prehending the nature of God, cf. especially, William A. Luijpen, Existential Phenomenology (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1960), John F. Bannan, The Philosophy of ~Merleau-Ponty (New York, 1967), as well as many works by Gabriel Marcel, Geoffrey Tillotson, and others. 3Abrams, p. 54. ^Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth; The Middle Years, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1937), II, 705; Jan. 18, 1816. 28 influence us, Wordsworth is saying in this instance that the meaning or value man "discovers" in his objective universe is actually imposed upon it by man himself, or, man is affected by influences he has himself effected. (Words worth's statement includes an awareness of the complexity of correlation and interaction between subject and object to which we shall need to return.) On the same subject Coleridge says flatly: "With me the act of contemplation makes the thing contemplated"5 (emphasis mine), but again it is Wordsworth who makes per haps the most forceful and inclusive assertion regarding the intentional nature of creativity. In his description of his youthful viewpoint he exclaims: I had a world about me; 'twas my own, I made it,6 which is his way of saying that he had then consciously organized and imposed the meanings and values of his percep tual world, so that for him it was a recognizably personal, even private place. Not, perhaps, that the young Wordsworth would or could have analyzed his performance as an inten tional imaginative projection at the time; the lines are the 5Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London, 1956), p. 144. Also it should be noted that Coleridge writes: "The will itself by confining and intensifying the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever," Biographia, p. 73, and in a note he adds that "intensifying" Is-his-neologism for "Intend to." 6The Prelude (1805) , III, 142-43. 29 considered retrospective views of the mature poet.7 This description parallels Luijpen's insistence that the self, "the subject— 'I,'" must be considered as intentionality, as existence; it is essentially the giving of meaning to the world,8 and we should note that Shelley, too, considered "mind," "thought," and "Existence" to be interchangeable terms.9 In his Preface to the English edition of Ideas, Husserl claimed that: "The essentially new influence . . . [in my philoso phy is] a self-contained sphere of intentionality."10 It will be noted that in all the above statements the notion of the intentional or creative power being essential to the theory of mind being proposed, is either explicitly stated or strongly implied. Which is to say, the function of mind in directing, shaping, and coloring perception, is fundamental to both romantic and phenomenological concepts of how the "subjective and objective worlds carry on their transactions."11 7Wordsworth is himself tentative in the matter. He says: Of these and other kindred notices I cannot say what portion is in truth The naked recollection of that time, And what may rather have been call'd to life By after meditation. (Prel., III, 644-648) 8Luijpen, p. 22. 9Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore, Md., 1971), p. 141. ~ 10(London, 1962), p. 17. ^Wasserman, "The English Romantics: The Grounds of Knowledge," in Studies in Romanticism, IV (1964), 23. 30 Not that romantic writers invariably express themselves so unequivocally as might appear from the quotations above, nor do they usually support a view that the perceiving mind alone creates its perceptual world. If they did we could hardly speak of them phenomenologically. Like Husserl and his followers in the field, they most often propose a belief that subject and object in some sense cooperate in responsi bility for the world as perceived, although the degree of involvement by each element sometimes seems uncertain.12 The point to be established here is that in a significant way romantic and phenomenological theories of the interac tive relationship existing between man and the objects of his perceptions both spring from an identifiably similar premise: That man creates about himself, most often con sciously, the meanings and values he attributes to the world. It is important to note that the "world" of the various theories, romantic and phenomenological, consists quite sim ply of the totality of the objects of all kinds which the subjective consciousness perceives. These may include any or all of the following: material reality, mental con structs, ideas, mental images, ideal entities, dreams, 12Phenomenologists commonly say of the object of a per ceptive act that it "displays" its qualities, etc., as in Aron Gurwitsch, "Husserl's Theory of the Intentionality of Consciousness in Historical Perspective," in Phenomenology and Existentialism, eds. Edward N . Lee and Maurice Mandel- baum (Baltimore, Md., 1967), p. 29. 31 visions, and fantasies, among others;13 individual notions on this matter are highly personal. It should also be noted in passing, although its major significance will not appear until later, that "object" in this larger sense includes anything whatever that presents itself to consciousness, the noumenal as well as the phenomenal. Husserl distinguishes them as being either "Thing" perceptions or "Experience" perceptions, the former consisting of one or several per spectives which "remain forever incomplete," since they must require such incompleteness, and we are referred of necessity to unified and continuous series of possible perceptions which . . . stretch out in an infinite number of directions in systematic strictly ordered ways, in each direction endlessly, and always dominated throughout by some order of meaning. (125) But "Experience" perceptions, which include consciousness of consciousness (Cartesian cogito, or Coleridgean "I AM"), consciousness of God or other spiritual concepts, are per ceived i^imanently rather than through a series of "perspec tive continua" (125). That is each is grasped intuitively in its "full unity" (127). Not quite completely, though, but this is a failure of the nature of "the essence of our perception" rather than of the immanence of givenness. And Husserl says that which is immanently given is an "absolute" (126), which will fall into one of two categories: the "Absolute of Consciousness" which comes about through "tran-r scendent perception" (158), or the "Absolute of a divine 1 3Gurwitsch, p. 28. 32 Being" which will "not only transcend the world, but obvi ously also the 'absolute' Consciousness" (158), and is therefore given as direct or unmediated intuition. For the romantic poets, awareness of this purely human ability to impose the will imaginatively in an evaluative and attributive way upon the phenomena of existence contrib utes significantly to the uniqueness of their poetry and to their critical stance. To quote Abrams again, for the romantic writers with their expressive theory of poetry a work of art is essentially the internal made external, resulting from a creative process operating under the impulse of feeling, and embodying the combined products of the poet's perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. Definitions of creativity comparing poetic composition metaphorically with the creative activity of God go as far back in English critical theory as Sidney's Apologie. But the relational link between creativity and intentional (as contrasted to adventitious) activity, with the associated questions of individual freedom and responsibility, remained largely blurred and submerged. The prolonged philosophical debate following Descartes forced the matter to the surface, and in the eighteenth century poets inherited the empiri cist/idealist controversy at the height of its contentious ness. But as Wasserman says, it is highly likely that the subtleties of eighteenth century epistemology both drove the poets to confront the external world and deterred them from confronting 1“"Mirror," p. 22. 33 it in any important way.15 It is true that Edward Young, for instance, could write in his Night Thoughts that Our senses, as our reason, are divine, And half create the wondrous world they see. (VI, 425-26) But "half create" is really an overstatement in the context in which these lines appear, for he continues: But for the magic organ's powerful charm Earth were a rude, uncolor'd chaos still, and it is obviously only the Lockean "secondary qualities" Young is thinking of. This is a far cry from the complete kind of partnership contained in Wordsworth's image of the mind as Creator and receiver both, Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds. (Prel., 1850, II, 232-35) What the romantics provided that eighteenth-century poets had lacked was an intuitive awareness that the concept of creative consciousness demands a world to be conscious of, and correlatively, that the world insofar as it has meaning assumes its meaning only for and due to the active participation of man himself; i.e., it exists for him quali tatively in and through his perceptive acts. Coleridge, as we saw in the previous chapter, is clearly aware of this primary phenomenological position, and devoted the greater part of Chapter XII in the Biographia to its explicitation. 15"The English Romantics: The Grounds of Knowledge," in Studies in Romanticism, IV (1964), 18. 34 That he is deeply indebted to Schelling for much of this material has been adequately dealt with by Thomas McFarland, among others;16 that it drives close to the question can be seen in Husserl's also quoting from part of it in attempting to describe his position.17 After examining separately the fallibility of both empiricist and idealist theories, Coleridge shows that a synthesis offers the only tenable resolution. He says that the "I Am" (conscious self) is groundless, but only because it is itself the ground of all other certainty. Now the apparent contradiction that the former position, namely the existence of things with out us, which from its nature cannot be immediately cer tain, should be received as blindly and as independently of all ground as the existence of our own being, the tran scendental philosopher can solve only be 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-consciousness. (148) There are two terms in this passage which may cause confu sion: "unconsciously," and "identical." It is important to note that Coleridge does not say that the creative process is unconscious, just that philosophers may be unconscious that its nature and function contain aspects of both empiri cist and idealist theory. As the second point, C. E. Pulos has sought to show that when Shelley presents the subjective 16Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradi tion (Oxford, 1969). 17cf. Ideas, p. 117 and Biographia, p. 148, where both authors illustrate the relationships existing between sub ject and object by means of reference to perceiving a table, for instance. 35 image and the object as being identical it is a reflection of lingering Humean scepticism,1 8 and at a first glance there seems to be something of this in the above passage from the Biographia. Indeed, later in the same chapter Coleridge says that "object and subject, being and knowing, are identical,"19 but we need to study these passages in their total context to properly understand them. A closer reading shows that in the quotation above, Coleridge does not mean by "identical" that subject and object are inter changeable notions. Rather, he says that if either realism (empiricism) or idealism is pushed to its logical limit it will be found to be identical with the other, for let it be remembered 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. (148) This is not to infer that from either viewpoint the concern is only with mere mental images, as Hume would have it, for Coleridge continues: It is to the true and original realism that I would direct the attention. This believes and requires neither more nor less than that the object which it [mind] beholds or presents to itself is the real and very object, (149) a definition which we have seen echoed in Husserl. There fore, since the self as "I Am" is undeniable (in Cartesian terms), and "is itself the ground of all other certainty," and the object is the "real and very" thing we take it to 18The Deep Truth (Lincoln, Neb., 1954), passim. 19Biographia, Thesis VI, p. 152. 36 be, then the statement that the objective world is "one and the same thing with our own immediate self-consciousness" can only mean that for Coleridge subject and object are fully integrated in a perceptual relationship; i.e., they are correlative, a point which he had in fact previously spelled out.20 It would appear, then, that Coleridge and Wordsworth in their different ways in several instances express views closely analogous to certain important aspects of twentieth- century phenomenology, particularly with reference to the intentionality of conscious acts of perception, and to the active participation of the subject in helping define qual itatively man's world as he finds it. Up to this point also there is considerable apparent agreement between them as to the reality of the world perceived. To the extent this is true they are both close to a phenomenological concept in the mode Husserl called the "natural standpoint," or as Coleridge nas it; "The realism common to all mankind" (148). But just as we must understand that the main thrust of Husserl's phenomenological studies is away from the natural standpoint toward an idealistic concept of essence,21 so we must recognize that Coleridge, Wordsworth, 2 0Ibid., p. 144. 21 Ideas, Preface, p. 5. In describing the purpose of his phenomenological studies Husserl writes: "In the work before us transcendental phenomenology is not founded as the empirical science of the empirical facts of this world of experience. Whatever facts present themselves serve only as 37 and other romantic writers most often express views of the subject/object relationship that are decidedly less dogmatic than has so far appeared, examples of which will be dealt with subsequently. In their efforts to illuminate these sometimes difficult distinctions their language becomes, in Shelley's words, "vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things."22 Of the three major romantic poets, Coleridge, Words worth, and Shelley, who attempted at least partial syntheses of the various philosophical strands influencing their thought, Shelley's seems unusually elusive. At different times he was swayed by several philosophic systems, and it examples .... In this book [Ideas], then, we treat of an a priori science ("eidetic," directed upon the universal in its original intuitability), which appropriates . . . and sets out as its a priori the indissoluble essential struc tures of transcendental subjectivity, which persist in and through all imaginable modifications." (5-6) A little later he reiterates the point: Pure or transcendental phenomenology will be established not as a science of facts, but as a science of essential Being (as eidetic science); a science which aims exclusively at establishing "knowledge of essences" (Wesenserkenntnisse) and absolutely no "facts." (40) And: The phenomena of transcendental phenomenology will be char acterized as non-real (irreal). Other reductions, the spe cifically transcendental, "purify" the psychological phenom ena from that which lends them reality, and therewith a set ting in the real "world." (40) 22Defence of Poetry, in Complete Works of Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London, 1934), p. 111. 38 appears likely that despite his occasional efforts to reduce these varied influences to a semblance of order, his thought remained relatively unorganized.23 Still, as has been said of Coleridge, Shelley seems to have engaged in a more or less consistent search for ideas and arguments "that best suited his own purposes,"21* i.e., a comprehensive expression of his beliefs. As with other romantics a catalog of his philosophical sources only emphasizes his ealecticism and the apparent ambiguity of his position, perhaps because this way the emphasis lies too heavily on the disparities between the total philosophical stances those sources represent, rather than upon what new vision Shelley sought to flesh out. We submit that after making due allowance for the variety of ideas he took up from time to time it is possible to discern within them a shifting but distinctly phenomeno logical pattern taking shape although, again like Coleridge, he never completely realized it in written form. Shelley, like other romantic poets (and later phenome nologists) , found his vision tended to elude exacting formu lation, partly because its radical nature demanded a funda mental reorientation of thought, partly because its implica tions for the totality of existence inexorably expanded with time, partly because of the limitations of language. He 23Mary Shelley, Note to Prometheus Unbound, The Com plete Works, Julian Edition (London, 1926-1930). 2I*J. A. Appleyard, Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 197. 39 found himself moving into an area of discourse where termi nology was, and to a lesser extent still is, sparse, impre cise, and cluttered with the speculative detritus of centuries. In any event, the effort to express "the before unap prehended relations" of man and his world as correlate terms of perception threw an inordinate strain on the communica tive resources of essentially poetic language; it is scarcely to be wondered at that it sometimes fails to convey Shelley's intuition with all the immediate clarity he or we might wish. In The Romantic Conflict,25 Alan Rodway writes that Coleridge was able to express a very sensitive and sophisticated awareness in language of a primitive kind. That is to say, language used as it is used in uncivilized cultures, where ideas have to be conveyed indirectly through sappy metaphors. (174) Or as W. I. Renwick says in another context, "it is one way of expressing the inexpressible."26 In his endeavor to illustrate simultaneously the nature and meaning of the con cepts he wished to express, Shelley, like other romantic writers, developed a technique which combined a wide-ranging use of metaphor with what is virtually a phenomenological presentation of their material from a sequence of stand points; i.e., as a series of "adumbrational presentations" 2s(London, 1963). 26English Literature, 1789-1815 (London, 1963), p. 180. 40 which together form a "noematic system."27 A Defence of Poetry, his major critical work, serves as a good example. In The Mirror and the Lamp, Abrams notes in his analy sis of the Defence that one can discriminate two planes of thought in Shelley's aesthetic— one Platonic and mimetic, the other psycholog ical and expressive— applied alternatively to each of the major topics under discussion. (126) and he sees this as ambiguity arising from imperfect assimi lation of antithetical viewpoints. It should be noted that while "mimetic" and "expressive" are by no means synonymous with, nor necessarily related to, empirical and idealistic philosophies, they are nonetheless descriptive of general attitudes toward functions of the mind associated with the latter pair of concepts. That is, the mental images which both theories propose are in one case imitative of an external reality, and in the other they are original produc tions of the mind. As we have seen, when Coleridge is faced with need to resolve the conflicting claims of these two philosophical positions, he first criticizes them separately and then brings their strong points together in a synthesis; Shelley's technique has similarities. Earl Wasserman has shown that the seeming paradoxes within Mont Blanc are resolved once the poem's "correct order of things" is identified. This, he says, is the recognition that apparently contradictory passages in the 27Gurwitsch, p. 53. 41 poem actually establish "the creation of a third position" which is "the relational system by which the poem conducts its integrative act."20 As we shall see with other romantic poets the juxtaposition of opposing views to establish a third is actually part of a widespread technique for helping in the difficult task of clarifying their thesis of subject and object confronting each other in reciprocal interaction. This is the "order of things" in the Defence. What Abrams takes to be "two planes of thought" are in fact only the two most apparent of several perspectives of a whole which is greater and more complex than the sum of them both. Wasserman has recently noted that in the Defence the terms "imitation" and "expression" are "only partial and complementary phases of [Shelley's] poetics, he uses them almost indiscriminately."29 As in Coleridge's use of "iden tical" this does not indicate synonymity so much as total correlation, which Shelley expresses as the relation subsisting, first between existence and per ception, and secondly between perception and expression. (Ill) where perception is seen as presenting images of existence to the mind (imitation), and expression as presenting these images imaginatively to existence. Or as he phrases it when he elevates the discussion from the methodological to the 2 8Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore, Md., 1959), p. 198. 29A Critical Reading, p. 216. 42 transcendent level: "A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth."30 The relationship with phenomenology becomes clearer when this last statement is compared with Husserl's claim that his intention is to set out "the indissoluble essential structures" (truth) which "persist in and through all imaginable modifications" (eternal) as expressions of "the empirical field of . . . experiences" (life) . 31 Shelley begins by saying: "Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and it is connate with the origin of man" (109). Since, therefore, the imagination ("perception of . . . value") originates within the subjective consciousness, Shelley clearly introduces man as the author of his perceptions. This is his starting point. But it is not so simple, for Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. (109) This statement does not conflict with Shelley's initial assertion, as has been sometimes alleged,32 it only adds a new dimension (perspective). What Shelley seems to be driv ing at is that although perception of value is imposed sub jectively by the imagination, consciousness is not self- 30Defence, p. 115. 31 Ideas, pp. 5-6. 32Abrams, for example, pp. 126-131. 43 contained.33 The raw data of experience are, in fact, partly external (object) and partly internal (subject), and from these man synthesizes perceptions which are then avail able— at least to poets— to expression. This reading is immediately confirmed by Shelley's adding: But there is a principle within the human being . . . which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody, alone, but harmony. (109) This "harmony" being an "adjustment" or reciprocal balance accommodating subject to object, and vice versa; i.e., a synthesis organizing a new imaginative value from the two main sources of perceptions, external and internal. Shelley goes on to observe that children and primitives are almost completely dominated by the phenomena of their environment which they try to imitate, and even social man is influenced by the pressures of society. But as man becomes more sophisticated he imposes an increasing sense of order on the phenomena he perceives, and this organizing ability is most fully developed in poets in whom it "is very great" (111) , "approximating to the beautiful" (111) . 31* Which fully restores the poet's creative (expressive) role. As we have noted, the phenomenological object can be drawn from "common experiences" or "social realities" among other sources,35 and Shelley makes a point of saying that 33A Critical Reading, Note 2, p. 205, also Pulos, passim. 3‘ 'Ibid., p. 205. 35Gurwitsch, p. 28. 44 poets may "express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds," which communicating itself to its audience "gathers a sort of reduplication [noema36]from that commun ity" (111). Thus he shows himself intuitively aware of what was to become an important phenomenological insight.37 But the poet is not merely a man whose ability to organize his perceptions is unusually marked, he "partici pates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one" (112) because, according to Wasserman, each mind is essentially an equivalent particle of the Absolute, so that the distinction among individual enti ties is merely nominal, and since all minds, Shelley holds, perform according to the same laws, the mind of the "creator"— that is, the poet— "is itself the image of all ether minds!"3 8 and his participation is predicated upon his sharing quali ties of the One in his own spirit. It is for this reason, a little later, that Shelley describes the poetic imagination as "that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man" (113), it too showing the cre ative powers present in man. But these creative abilities are mysterious ("curtained"), and seem to resist the defini tions applying to other mental activities. "Poetry . . . is not subject to the control of the active powers of the 36cf Appendix A. 37cf Ideas, Chapter 9, "Noesis and Noema," for a dis cussion of the manner in which the noesis (act) intends cer tain qualities in the object which as noema reinforce the noetic concepts in the perceiving mind. 38A Critical Reading, p. 205. mind," says Shelley, and "its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with consciousness or will" (135). A casual reading of this passage may appear to discover a fresh ambiguity here, between creative imagination— which as we have seen is shown to be a conscious organization of per ceptions— and poetry, the expression of this same imagina tion, and which "is not subject to control." But the con fusion is only apparent; Shelley is really making a signifi cant distinction. As Wasserman has said, for Shelley "in spiration" is related to instinct and intuition within the poet, not to a concept of divine intervention.39 Nor is Shelley refuting his carefully built-up definition of the active functions of mind. What he is saying is that the combination of emotion, and thought, and circumstance which in some men leads to poetic composition is in a sense fortuitous. He writes; "A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry!" (135), for "the mind in creation is as a fading coal" (135), a "fading brightness" (135) , "its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea" (136), unpredictable in its coming and going. And he insists again that despite its imponderable nature, "this power arises within the mind" (134). Recently there has developed a tendency to ascribe Shelley's philosophical stance to the influence of a perva sive scepticism, and the arguments are persuasive.1 *0 But 39Ibid. 1 *°A Critical Reading, and Pulos. 46 Whitehead considered Shelley, along with Wordsworth, as the most scientifically oriented of poets,1 *1 and Desmond King- Hele among others has expounded on the poet's continuing interest in experimental chemistry and physics. This kind of interest in empirically demonstrable science would seem to temper the assertion that Shelley's references to "mat ter" are only concessions to "the popular vocabulary.1 *2 This, coupled with the poet's well-known concern with social reform, which also presupposes a real objective world in which all men have their dwelling suggests that for Shelley scepticism was a justification for witholding definitive conclusions until more evidence was available to him. Therefore it seems reasonable to assume that his scepticism was to some extent provisional, and although it colored his stance it was not conclusive in shaping his thought, which continued to move toward a genuine synthesis despite Hume's negativisim. It appears, then, that in the Defence Shelley's appar ently shifting viewpoint is in fact but part of a technique for illuminating more fully what he recognizes as a highly complex interrelationship existing between the organizing mind, its phenomenal world, and the poet's perception of it expressed as poetry. This is a technique he shares to an 41"The Romantic Reaction," in Science and the Modern World (London, 1925), p. 123. 1 *2A Critical Reading, Note 16, p. 137. 47 extent with other romantic writers attempting a similar exposition, and in a general way it can usefully be-' described as a basically phenomenological method. The rela tionships he sees are drawn from a synthesis of concepts usually regarded in his own time and later as antithetical to each other, and which were not fully integrated as a philosophical system until Husserl outlined his theory of phenomenology in the twentieth century. Shelley, too, continually sought for a means of expressing what he intui tively felt to be a universal principle. CHAPTER III EXISTENTIAL DUALITY AND COLERIDGE'S AESTHETIC In tracing familial resemblances and parallels between aspects of English romantic thought and phenomenology we have been methodically retracing the steps of explicitation followed by Edmund Husserl in defining his own phenomenolog ical theory,1 insofar as this study and his are pragmati cally compatible. Having first outlined the general situa tion giving rise to their shared basic concepts, the second stage was the identification of intentionality at the root of conscious perception. In the present chapter we shall follow Husserl one step further: description of the "in trinsic duality" lying at the essential core of existence, phenomenologically speaking, the so-called "noetico/noemat- ic" relationship. It will be seen that this provides a nec essary link in comprehending the romantic movement's radical framework: the subject/object correlation. We have noted in Shelley the traditionally stubborn problem posed by the seeming ambivalences of his thought; 1 Ideas, and in a more concentrated form, Cartesian Meditations (The Hague, 1962). 48 49 with Coleridge the emphasis alters for while he seldom uses opposing ideas in mere juxtaposition, he typically presents them in polar pairs, seeking to fit them into an overall unity. But his sporadic statements of purpose shift, and the unity often seems chimerical. At one point he writes of himself: 0 Lord! what thousands of threads in how large a web may not a metaphysical spider spin out of the dirt of his own guts, but alas! it is a net for his own super-ingenious spidership alone.2 But despite such periodic despair, Coleridge's belief in a homogeneous universe is persistent. The metaphor of the web is appropriate, for he constantly spins and respins his philosophical strands, seeking to discern a pattern in which "all extremes meet," attempting to establish a unity in which, to use Richard Haven's words, "everything is an analogue of everything else."3 This feeling Coleridge has of cosmic design encompassing all experience is an almost instinctual belief he shares with most of his fellow poets; in one sense it looks backward to a concept of divine pur pose as figured forth in Lovejoy's Chain of Being,1 * and at the same time it looks ahead to twentieth-century syncretic 2Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coborn, #2784, v. 2 (1804- 1808) (New York', 1957) . 3Patterns of Consciousness (Boston, 1969), p. 2. **The Great Chain of Being (New York, 1960) , passim. 50 thought.5 For Coleridge it finds expression in his sense of intimate interrelationships existing between subject and object. In the Statesman1s Manual,6 he writes: I seem to myself to behold in the quiet objects, on which I am gazing, more than an arbitrary illustration, more than a mere simile, the work of my own fancy. I feel an awe, as if there were before my eyes the same power as that of reason— the same power in a lower dignity,— and therefore a symbol established in the truth of things. (462) In this reflective statement we come very close to a summa tion of an attitude which is pervasive in his philosophy, and which is defined in this study as being essentially phe nomenological. This is more than meditation upon a simple pantheism in which subjett and object are alike in both being part of a cosmic scheme, although there is a lingering element of that here. More importantly it is a clear recog nition of an intimate interrelationship in which the sub ject's perception includes awareness of the object's unique ness, and at the same time, while reflecting in some way an aspect of a total outlook which is the subject's own, pre sents an insight, however hazy, of ultimate truth. From one point of view a primary aim of Coleridge's epistemology can be seen as an ongoing attempt to express and explain the 5Richard Coe, Contemporary Critical Method, Ideology, Science and Reality- ^ (Unpublished Doctoral dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1971), particularly pp. 93-100. 6Shedd, I, 462. 51 synthesis he intuits existing between these three elements, which Thomas McFarland in Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradi tion7 describes as accounting "for the status and interrela tions of three entities, the ego or subject, the external or object, and the questions arising from the defining limita tions of both subject and object, or the question of God" (55) . It is an endeavor to which as Wasserman has it: "Each of these [romantic] poets offers a different answer . . . but all share the necessity to solve the question."8 We have noted in Shelley an inclination to present alternating views of a single perspective in an effort to establish a third position which resists definition for any number of possible reasons; in Coleridge's somewhat similar technique polar pairs of terms are frequently juxtaposed in an attempt to reach a "reconciliation of opposites,"9 or a synthesis which leads toward a more inclusive unity. McFarland has said: Coleridge recognized that all dichotomous thinking is in a sense trichotomous thinking . . . for to think of a polar ity of A and B is not only to think of A, and to think of B, but also to think of a third, their relationship. (230, n2) 7(Oxford, 1969) . 8"The English Romantics: the Grounds of Knowledge," in Studies in Romanticism, IV (1964), 21. 9A thorough investigation of this Coleridgean phrase is contained in Richard H. Fogle, The Idea of Coleridge's Crit icism (University of California")! Berkeley, 1962) . 52 At the same time, J. A. Appleyard, in Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature,10 has commented that it would be no contribution to the understanding of Cole ridge's intellectual development [to give] the impression that his progress from tentative to more elaborated posi tions was by logical steps and clearly stated transitions. . . . Still . . . there is a consistent development of ideas. (93) Appleyard also notes that "scholars are far from agreed on the interpretation of much of [Coleridge's] thought" (2), a problem we must immediately confront. For example, while McFarland says of Coleridge's philosophic views: "I find in them a remarkable unity and cohesiveness" (xxiv), W. I. Renwick disparages their homogeneity as being only tenuously held together by the flow of thought, although, he admits, we tend to keep believing that if we only read far enough a complete doctrine will emerge. Coleridge felt, often enough, that it was about to do so; but it never did, and the wise reader must resist the temptation to select and organize . . . [for] it may be possible to build up a sys tem of metaphysics or theology or aesthetics, but may we call it Coleridge's?11 Haven repeats the time-honored contention that the sum of Coleridge's philosophy amounts to "little more than a mass of fragments," and also joins in warning of the dangers inherent in "attempts to complete or systematize Coleridge's speculative writings."12 Haven, whose interest is mainly 1 0(Cambridge, Mass., 1965). 1 English Literature, 1789-1815 (Oxford, 1963), pp. 190-191. 12Patterns, p. 2. 53 psychological, agrees "with many other critics that Cole ridge was a failure as a philosopher,"13 and Alfred North Whitehead, who thought Coleridge among the "deepest think ers" of the English romantic poets, was still moved to remark that "Coleridge's attempt at an explicit philosophi cal formulation" was "influential in his own generation," but is not among "those elements of the thought of the past which stands for all time,"14 a dignity he reserved for Wordsworth and Shelley. It will be contended here that while it is a truism that Coleridge, like other romantics, never achieved complete synthesis of his philosophy— for reasons that will appear— Appleyard is correct in his opin ion that a "unity of viewpoint" is discoverable,15 and that as McFarland says: Coleridge's thought demands for its assessment a recogni tion . . . that his intellectual endeavor consists of an organic unity. (xxxvii) Furthermore, while we cannot pretend to make predictions "for all time," we submit that Coleridge and other romantic writers were in fact already committed to a "style and man ner of thought" which foreshadows the broad outlines of twentieth-century phenomenology, and which to some extent continues to resist "explicit philosophical formulation." Perhaps it is something of this which is instrumental in 1 3Ibid., p . 3. 14Science and the Modern World (New York, 1926), p. IZOi. 15Appleyard, p. 3. 54 contributing to Coleridge's continuing to be what McFarland calls "a burning issue in modern literary studies" (xxxvi). Indeed, it is McFarland who has made some of the most telling comparisons between Coleridge's philosophical views and those of Edmund Husserl, founder of modern phenomenol ogy. Taking "the Kant-Spinoza paradigm of the 'I am'/'it is' opposition" (200) as typical of the tension between Christian morality and pantheism that he sees pervading Coleridge's thought, McFarland points out that the key prob lem is Spinoza's concept of "substance." For in this system "it follows that substance is congruent to 'God,'" and "thus we see emerging before our eyes the final equation of pan theism, the identity of the One and the Many" (68). But pantheism negates individuality, divine or otherwise. In this view Coleridge's dilemma is that as poet he is at tracted to, and in fact needs, the concrete "it is" world of objective reality as the prime source of poetic imagery. But as a philosopher (and a moralist) he wants to affirm the supremacy of the "I am." As a poet, his linguistic many-and-one urge and his con cern for the "it is" wove themselves harmoniously about Schelling's philosophical f e ‘ v <ai irav singing its siren song of art's supremacy and beauty's truth. But as Cole ridge moved from the concreteness of his poetic to the rigorous abstraction of his philosophical involvement, the alluring flesh of Schelling melted to the white and dread ful skeleton beneath: Spinoza! And the siren song of art's supremacy changed to the harpy rasp of moral horror. (123) What Coleridge seeks to accomplish according to McFarland, is to "reticulate" the immediacy of pantheism with the moral 55 Christian viewpoint. And Coleridge seems to come close to doing this, or at least points a way when he comments that Spinoza, at the very end of his life, seems to have gained a glimpse of the truth. In the last letter published in his works, it appears that he began to suspect his prem iss. His unica substantia is, in fact, a mere notion,— a subject of the mind, and no object at all.16 Which McFarland compares with Husserl's position: The objective world, the world that exists for me, that always has and always will exist for me, the only world that ever can exist for me,— this world, with all its objects, I said, derives its whole sense and its existen tial status, which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental Ego.17 And in a long and detailed note, McFarland adds that when Coleridge writes that "Spinoza's 'God as an Object' forgets 'that an Object . . . presupposes a Subject' (Letters, iv, 548n.), he enunciates an insight that translates easily into Husserlian terms" (379) . Moreover, Husserl and Coleridge are close also with reference to McFarland's earlier dictum that a systematic philosophy such as Coleridge attempted, must account for the interrelations of three entities: subject, object, and the questions arising from the defining limitations of both subject and object, [i.e.] the question of God. (55) As already noted McFarland underscores similarities between Coleridge's position and that of Husserl in regard to the first two of these three entities, but he fails to show how 16Table Talk, April 30, 1830. 17Cartesian Meditations, p. 65. 56 closely Husserl comes to meeting the third requirement also. In point of fact McFarland's criterion almost paraphrases Ideas, where Husserl writes: In epistemological reflection the idea of God is a neces sary limiting concept, or an indispensable pointer in the construction of certain limiting concepts, (210) to which he dryly adds that this is a necessity "which even the philosophical atheist cannot dispense with." Indeed, Husserl is as aware as Coleridge of the necessity for com prehending God as ultimate datum. He writes of "the Subject of absolutely perfect knowledge" (123) , and the "ideal representative of absolute knowledge" (386) , and the "ground" of "constituting consciousness" which perceives "concrete actuality as the source of possible and real val ues extending indefinitely" (158), i.e., God as the final referent in the phenomenological effort to describe the nature and function of creative consciousness, the tran scendental Ego. It is true Coleridge wants to go further than this,18 seeking rational justification for his intui tive belief in a "moral creator and governor" (B.L., 111), a "maker and judge" (113), a "self-conscious Creator" (114) as "both the corner-stone and the key-stone of morality" (113), whereas Husserl carefully suspended consideration of these matters (at least in his work so far published) because the governing principle of the Absolute must be found in 18Argument showing the concept of God as ultimate crround leads into a moral question, Biographia, pp. 111- 113. 57 the Absolute itself and through pure and absolute reflec tion. (Ideas, 142) To command such absolute thought is by definition beyond the limits of the phenomenological method as such, although he speculates that "there must be intuitive manifestations to which theorizing thought can adjust itself" in order to com prehend "the assumed theological principle" (143). That is to say, Husserl, like Coleridge, reaches toward the noumenal and the transcendent, but untroubled by the poet's attrac tion toward pantheism, Husserl is more clearly aware of the limitations of his philosophical apparatus. Nonetheless, for Husserl, as for Coleridge, consciousness of God as abso lute first cause is a necessity. And although Coleridge's intuition ijs an act of faith, as McFarland shows, it depends as much upon reason, for Coleridge writes that faith is fidelity, fealty, allegiance of the moral nature to God. . . . The will of God is the last ground and final aim of all our duties.19 And so he too comes back to "ground," a rationalized justi fication for faith's "final aim." McFarland concludes that Coleridge's philosophical system could not even begin to "hang together" until by his rational acceptance of the Trinity, he found a way to staple the chain of "I am" consequences in an extramun- dane ground, thus at one and the same time guaranteeing the free agency of his moral being and the reality of external nature. (220) In the end 19Works, p. 564. 58 Coleridge did indeed accept the Trinity as a dogma of faith. But for him . . . Christian faith was an episte- mological function. Coleridge's system-craving reason had to see how— in what Husserl calls "syntaktische Gegen- standlichkeit"— the dogma arranged itself systematically. (231) To which McFarland adds that this acceptance, the "extrapo lation of the transcendence of the "I am" starting-point constitutes, I think, the very peak or limit of Coleridge's reasoning. . . . He did not linguistically elaborate the insight in the style of twentieth-century phenomenology, but it apparently lay just below the surface of his conscious intent" (243) . Coleridge comments: We being with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the self, in order to lose and find all self in God, (B.L., 154)20 (or what Haven calls "unitive consciousness").21 Here Cole ridge speaks as philosopher; as poet the reverse is equally true and equally important, i.e., he needs to establish a relationship between divine creativity and creativity in the finite sense of poetic composition. There are two reasons for this: first, there is the need for a ground and a defi nition of creative consciousness; second, there is the need to establish intentionality in order to lay solid claim to his own works. For, as he says in rejecting Hartleyan asso- 2“Coleridge's demonstration of the indubitability of his own existence is closely based on Descartes' cogito. cf. Biographia, pp. 147-148. 21 Patterns, p. 121. 59 ciationism, that reduces man to a passive role as perceptor or as the uncritical vehicle of "external causes equally passive" (B.L., 69), and according to this hypothesis, the disquisition to which I am at present soliciting the reader's attention may be as truly said to be written by Saint Paul's church as by me; for it is the mere motion of my muscles and nerves. (69) He also rejects the notion that "the will and the scientific reason" are only mental constructs, for since they corre spond in man to "an infinite spirit of an intelligent and holy will" (70), denial of these properties in man by impli cation impugns their reality in God. It is noteworthy that in each major systematic area of discussion Coleridge uses closely parallel forms of argu ment. In describing consciousness he writes: There are evidently two powers at work which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not pos sible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. . . . the imagination. (72) And imagination is then later described as itself being of two parts, primary, and secondary which is "an echo of the former . . . differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation" (167). Wasserman shows that Coleridge uses the same method in another context: Art, like the self-knowing subject, is "the middle quality between a thought and a thing, or . . . the union and reconciliation of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human."2 2 And there are obvious architectonic similarities with the 22Studies, p. 30. 60 remarks on the nature of the Trinity which read in part: the action of Love . . . is equally real with the Father and the Son; & proceeds co-eternally both from the Father and the Son— & neither of these Three can be conceived apart, nor confusedly— so that the Idea of God involves that of Tri-unity.23 As Haven says, "Coleridge has here conceived of God as an archetypal consciousness, and presented the persons or ele ments of the Trinity as aspects of that consciousness."24 In each case a third power is established by means of refer ence to two others; the first two are in turn authenticated, as it were, by the third. It is a reciprocal process, a "reconciliation of opposites," synthesis created by way of an expanding unity, correlation in the phenomenological sense. Thus we see that philosophically, theologically, and critically the central and dominating concern of Coleridge remains the definition of the complex of relationships he intuits as existing between subject and object, beginning with the "I am" or conscious self, and expressed at many levels. And nowhere is he closer to Husserl and phenomenol ogy. To quote McFarland once more: The largest common factor in the thought of Husserl and Coleridge is . . . their insistence upon the primacy and incommensurability of the "I am." For Husserl the "wonder of all wonders" was the pure ego and pure consciousness. (380, n.72.) 23Letters, II, pp. 1195-1196, to Thomas Clarkson, 13th October^ 1806. 24Patterns, p. 126. 61: And he goes on to say that while Coleridge and Husserl dif fer in their aims, "none the less Husserl's acceptance of the strict evidential validity of eidetic as well as factive phenomena is consistent with Coleridge's own orientation" (379-380). For, he notes, "both Husserl and Coleridge are characterized by a kind of philosophical egalitarianism in conceding equal theoretical importance to all phenomena" (380) ,25 As was indicated earlier,26 Coleridge and Husserl both begin their analyses of consciousness with a similar premise concerning the alternative philosophical positions repre sented by empiricism and idealism, Coleridge stating in the Biographia that his subjective epistemology founded in the "I am" is certainly antimaterialistic, but it is idealistic "only in so far as it is at the same time, and on that very account, the truest and most binding realism" (148). McFar land points to a passage in Ideas where Husserl sthtes "quite explicitly that in regard to transcendental- phenomenological Idealism, I . . . hold every form of cur rent philosophical realism (materialism] to be in princi ple absurd, as no less every idealism to which in its own arguments that realism stands contrasted. . . . Our phe- 2 5The Eidos, the pure essence, can be exemplified intuitively in the data of experience, data of perception, memory, and so forth, but just as readily also in the mere data of fancy (Phantasie). Hence, with the aim of grasping an essence itself' in its primoridal form, we can set out from corresponding empirical intuitions, but we can also set out just as well from non-empirical intuitions, intuitions that do not apprehend sensory existence, intuitions rather 'of a merely imaginative order.' Ideas, pp. 50-51. 26Chapter I of this study. 62 nomenological idealism does not deny the positive exis tence of the real (realen) world and of Nature. . . . Its sole task and service is to clarify the meaning of this world . . . as really existing" (Author's Preface to the English edition, pp. 19, 21.) (370) Which is to say, as with Coleridge, just as God is the absolute ground and model for the concept of creative con sciousness , so, at the mundane end of the philosophic spec trum, objective reality provides the foundation upon which analysis of the function of finite creative consciousness is established.2 7 But ti would be altogether too simple to go on multi plying instances .of close approximations between statements culled from Coleridge and Husserl. Probably enough has been said already to justify the proposition that their thought patterns are sufficiently similar to include them both under the rather general rubric of "phenomenological." The crux of their intimate philosophical relationship is to be found in their respective definitions of the creative functions of consciousness. For Husserl this is expressed in the corre lative duality he calls "noesis" and "noema"; for Coleridge it is the definition of imagination in Chapter xiii of the Biographia. The significance of this latter has been fre quently disputed, McFarland dismissing it as a "helter- skelter leap" away from Schelling's "untenable position" (156);; Haven depicting it as an outgrowth of Coleridge's 27The "thing-in-itself" is Husserl's term (Ideas, pp. 115 and 122). Coleridge speaks of the "object itself" (B.L., 76), and of the "table itself" (B.L., 148). 63 "experience of what he calls the poetic imagination,"28 and Watson presenting it as "a causal link" between Coleridge's philosophy and literature where it "finds its proper setting and fulfils its just service."29 We submit that it is not merely this last, but in fact arises organically from the discussion that precedes it in the Biographia. McFarland says that "the theory was . . . clearly not adequate, nor in truth designed for, the reticulation of all his [Cole ridge's] interests" (158); but it is the natural and neces sary bridge between the epistemology of the Biographia and the aesthetic. But before launching into a detailed comparison of Coleridge's and Husserl's positions we should note a warning sounded by both of them and commented on by Richard Hart Fogle who writes: "It is vital to remember that the facul ties of Coleridge's psychology are, as he says, distinct but not separate."30 The office of philosophical disquisitions consists in just distinctions; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having done so, we must then restore them in our con ceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; this is the result of philosophy; (B.L., 171) The mind in its workings is one; the faculties are not def inite, not objects of the senses. To know the mind we must 2 8Patterns, p. 162. 29Biographia, xix. 3°PP. 6-7. 64 analyze it, yet realize the limitations of analysis. And Fogle concludes: "Therefore, in conceiving the faculties as separate, as we must do in order to understand them, we are setting up necessary fictions."31 For as Husserl says, "every man . . . knows no domain of reality is isolated, the whole world is in the last resort a single 'Nature'" (Ideas, 142), a single entity perceivable as an infinity of possible perspectives, and therefore ultimately irreducible to "explicit philosophical formulation" in Whitehead's sense. These warnings apply equally to all the distinctions we shall need to make as we examine what is essentially a totally correlated series of concepts which are finally only clearly comprehensible as parts of an inte grated whole. Coleridge draws a parallel between the "alternate pulses of active and passive motion" of a water beetle and the "mind's self-experience in the act of thinking" (72). Both accept extrinsic phenomena in order to acquire a "momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion." In other words, the mind is both receptive and projective, accepting "all that appertains to the perception considered as passive and merely recipient" (92) , as the correlate of its active function or creativity; or as Husserl has it, the mind is 31cf. also Letters, II, #949, to Godwin, 4 June, 1803: ", . .it being the business of philosophy ever to distin guish without unnaturally dividing." 65 both "noetic" and "noematic."32 That is, the mind like the water beetle choosing its course, intentionally selects and defines the objects of its activity (all thought is "con sciousness of something"), while at the same time being receptive of its goals, in the case of the mind, the essence of the phenomena it has itself helped shape.33 This inter relationship, which is quite complex, becomes clearer in Coleridge's definition of imagination which follows from his description of these functions of mind. But before moving on to this it should be noted that he is also close to Husserl in insisting on the significance of the essence of phenomena,31* while indicating the essential becomes known intuitively.35 32Cf. Appendix A for a more detailed explicitation of the noetico/noematic relationship. 33Coleridge notes the significance of intentionality: "The will itself by confining and intensifying the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever." (B.L., 73). In a footnote he defines "inten sifying" in this' passage as being synonymous with "to intend." 31fCf. Distinction between "condition" and "essence" (B.L., 71), the stanzas from Davies' Nosce Teipsum referring to a "quintessence of things" (B.L., 174), and also the def inition of the "act of consciousness" as being identical with "time considered in its essence" (B.L., 73). This lat ter is particularly noteworthy; compare with Husserl on "phenomenological time" (Ideas, sec. 81). 35Coleridge comments in many places on the supremacy of intuitive knowledge: he equates "philosophic imagination" with "the sacred power of self-intuition" (B.L., 139), the "ascertaining vision" with "intuitive knowledge" (138), "original intuition" with "certainty" (140) , and "realizing intuition" with truth (144). 66 Typically, according to Coleridge, the two foregoing aspects of mind require a third: There are evidently two powers at work which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not pos sible 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. (72) But he goes on to say that "in common language, and espe cially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of the faculty [of the imagination], joined to a superior voluntary control over it." Which is to say, the word "imagination," has two meanings for him, one philosophical and one aesthetic. But again, these are distinctions only, not divisions. At the same time, Cole ridge's comment underscores his belief that his theory of the imagination is the essential link joining the philosoph ical first part of the Biographia with the critical analysis of poetry in the second part. This is further emphasized when the theory itself (p. 167) is preceded by a brief com parison of Wordsworth's definition of imagination in Poems, with a New Preface, with a recapitulation of Coleridge's own views as expressed at various points in the Biographia (160- 161). Coleridge clearly shows in this way that the philo sophical and the aesthetic considerations are intimately interrelated. Furthermore, the theory taken in isolation from the sometimes elaborate philosophical preparation for ' 67 it in the earlier chapters is largely incomprehensible.36 When we come to the theory of the imagination itself in Chapter XIII we are hardly surprised to find that it, too, is a duality, or what Fogle calls "opposing equals":37 The imagination then I consider either as primary, or sec ondary . The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of crea tion in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, 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. (167) But the daulity is not confined to function, for Coleridge has also said that for him "imagination" has two meanings, one philosophical and one aesthetic. Thus we shall first examine his theory from each of these viewpoints separately, and then in combination, recognizing that from any stand point primary and secondary imagination, although distin guishable, are as inseparable as any other pairs of facul ties or functions in Coleridge's psychology, or as any cor relates in Husserl's phenomenology. As Owen Barfield says in a perceptive study along broadly phenomenological lines: "The nature of primary imagination, and therefore of imagination as a whole, as Coleridge presents it, can really only be understood in 36It is exemplary to note Coleridge's own comment: "The fairest part of the most beautiful body will appear deformed and monstrous if dissevered from its place in the organic whole" (B.L., 135). 37Fogle, p. 7. terms of that relation between the act of thinking and its product, thought." 38 And as he goes on to observe, the philosophical aspect of imagination, the one most fully developed in the Biographia, demands careful study as a basis for the inferences about poetic imagination that we must draw "as best we can." Coleridge defines primary imagination as the "living power and prime agent of all human perception (emphasis mine), and since perception is a universal and inevitable accompaniment of thinking,39 pri mary imagination is by inference present to all thought. As "living power" and "prime agent" the function of primary imagination is similar to that of Husserl's noesis; i.e., it is constitutive (creative) of the perceptive act at the same time that it gives it direction (intentionality), both in selecting its objects as phenomena, and in imposing purpose (meaning) upon them. This is true of all human perception, as Coleridge says, whatever the existential status of its phenomenal objects: real, recollected, imaginary, illusory, revelatory, etc. As such, primary imagination is the power 38What Coleridge Thought (Middletown, Conn., 1971), p. 76. Barfield's brilliant extrapolation of poetic imagi nation from fragmentary clues in Coleridge's writings con cludes that primary imagination forms a foundation upon which its aesthetic counterpart is built. This view indi rectly supports the contentions of the present study. 39In the sense of awareness of the object of thought, since thought is always the consciousness of something (Ideas, 103). And Coleridge writes: "In all acts of posi- tiveTcnowledge there is required a reciprocal concurrence . . . namely of the conscious being and of that which is in itself unconscious" (B.L. 145). 69 directing mind actively toward objects of thought while bringing formal shape ( \ i o<J>prf=morphe) to them.110 In Cole ridge's words: "the act of contemplating makes the thing contemplated . . . [and] the representative forms of things rise up into existence" (144). Or in Husserl's terms: Noeses, animating the material . . . into continuous syn theses , so bring into being the consciousness of some thing, that in and through it the objective unity of the field of objects (Gegenstandlichkeit) may permit of being consistently "declared," "shown forth," and "rationally determined." (Ideas, 230-231) Furthermore, as Fogle notes, imagination mediates not only between the active and passive functions of mind, it also mediates between reason and understanding, "which rela tively to each other are active and passive." Reason enables man to apprehend truths beyond the reach of the senses. It is immediate in action and indemonstrable by discursive argument, since its grounds are in itself.1 *1 That is, reason is intuitive of what we have seen Husserl calling immanent perception, which he says "necessarily guarantees the existence (Existenz) of its object" (Ideas, 130). Fogle goes on to say that for Coleridge reason is itself the starting point of thought, nothing in the mind can explain it. From the reason comes our idea of God.1 *2 We have already noted that for Husserl immanent perception provides access to the noumenal and the Absolute; reason as the guarantor of truth and reason as the channel to recogni tion of God present obvious parallels that hardly need 1 *°Cf. Ideas, p. 227. ^Fogle, p. 6. 42Ibid. expansion. **3 Also, Coleridge says the primary imagination is a "repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM." Thus it is the intuitive realization of the Absolute in the reason that provides the link between ongoing divine creativity and its finite ana logue , primary imagination in its activity of universal presence in the act of perception— the noetic function. * * * * But not only is primary imagination active, a "living power," initiator and shaper of acts of perception, and "prime agent" in its projective function, it is necessarily also receptive of the data with which it works. It has in this sense its passive element, with two main sources of its materials, so to speak; reason (cf. Fogle, above), and secondary imagination. If we assume that imagination is "both active and passive"--and this would seem to be a valid inference from Coleridge's habitual association of interrelated polarities (in this case the intimate association of imagination with active and passive mind), and in line with his clearly Husserlian pattern of thought— then philosophicall speaking primary and secondary imagination stand relative to each other as the active and passive elements of it. As already shown, primary imagination itself displays both active and *3Coleridge quotes Plotinus in equating "intuition" with the "highest knowledge" (B.L., 139). ‘ t‘ t"The noeses, properly so-called, are essentially sub ject to the critical authority of the reason" (Ideas, 284). ' " 71 passive properties, although in relation to secondary imag ination it is preponderately the more active of the two in the special sense in which Coleridge seems to use the terms. Secondary imagination also presents both qualities, but in an inverse ratio. While secondary imagination is relatively "passive" compared to its primary counterpart, in this con text the word is by no means synonymous with "inactive." Rather, it is indicative of its main re-creative function, which is not projective, but lies within the mind. This is true of its phenomenological analogue, noema, and it is true of secondary imagination which Coleridge says is an "agency" with a mode of "operation." Secondary imagination, like noema, is relatively passive in the sense that it is the recipient of perceptions initially engineered byiits more active projective correlate. Coleridge specifically calls it an "echo" of primary imagination, and therefore in a degree dependent (as noema is) upon the constituting activ ity of primary imagination (noesis). The metaphoric echo is an inexact and somewhat misleading analogy because there is no chronological sequence involved in the duality; both types of activity are totally interrelated, neither being possible without the other; they are but two perspectives of a single mental process: the act of perception.45 And it is in this context that we should read the statement that i *5"No noetic phase without a noematic phase that belongs specifically to it" (Ideas, 250). secondary imagination is "identical with the primary in the : kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation." This phrase, which has sometimes been interpreted as meaning that secondary imagination is only a fainter carbon copy of primary imagination, really seems to point toward the inseparability of their correlate functions, a notion underscored by Coleridge in the warning against confusing distinction with division referred to above, and which in the Biographia follows the theory of imagination by a few pages. Since imagination has correlate functions in respect to both active and passive aspects of mind, and to reason and understanding, "identical" applied to their relationship can hardly mean duplication in an inferior degree. The functions are distinct but not divis ible, and it would seem to follow from this that together these dual facets of imagination accomplish a single agency which would be impossible for either separately (if indeed the separation of correlates is conceivable).46 Which would explain why Coleridge points to their differing modes of operation, which otherwise sounds almost like a contradic tion to "identical." Thus the degree to which primary and secondary imagination differ is a reference to the relative activity of their respective functions. The parallels between the primary/secondary duality and that of noesis/ noema is further emphasized by Coleridge's reference to sec- * * 6Ideas , p. 266. ondary imagination "co-existing with the conscious will," for while Husserl says: "Noesis is that which consciously constitutes the phenomena of perception" (Ideas, 232) , its intentionslity is inherent to thinking, and in a given act of perception it may occur almost without conscious voli tion, whereas noema is at all times purposeful as it "dis solves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create," imposing order upon the multiplicity of phenomenal percep tions . And where re-creation is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it strug gles to idealize and unify. (167) It is this aspect of secondary imagination which lays par ticular stress on the need to clearly comprehend the total interrelationship of the duality: even as secondary imagi nation perceives phenomena qualitatively shaped by primary imagination, the noetic function in turn depends upon its secondary correlate for input of ideas and concepts about the perceptual world, organized as an ideal order or unified stream of consciousness, upon which the activities of pri mary imagination are based. This argument is summarized by Fogle in looking at secondary imagination from the perspec tive of its relationship to understanding. He says: Reason's opposite, the understanding (our ordinary "rea son") , is the discursive intelligence, the faculty by which we deal with phenomena. The understanding organizes the evidence of the senses , * * 7 or more precisely, the evidence of phenomena of all kinds as l *7Fogle, p. 6. 74 these are perceived. **8 Finally, Coleridge insists that secondary imagination is "essentially vital, even as objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead" (167). This statement, the first part of which seems to be almost a tautological repe tition of the initial definition of secondary imagination, is actually significant for several reasons. In the first place the use and reuse of "essentially" points to two ways in which it is being employed here: it not only underscores the fundamental distinction between perceiver and perceived, which may have become blurred in considering their intimate relationship, but it also shows that all the talk about apparatus and procedures must not obscure the fact that like Husserl, it is the essences of phenomena that focally con cern Coleridge. Again, italicizing "vital" surely indicates Coleridge's desire to emphasize the active nature of sec ondary imagination, although its role is largely receptive. In fact it is the perceptive faculty in the commonest sense **8It is only fair to add that Fogle sees primary and secondary imagination as alternatives rather as correla tives , although such a reading would seem to introduce the very divisiveness in analyzing psychological concepts that he is at pains to warn us of. In any event Coleridge him self notes that in his own usage "the term subject is used by me . . .as equivalent to mind or sentient being, and as the necessary correlative of object" (B.L., 144). And since his definition of imagination includes reference to the pri macy of perception--in which the notion of subject/object correlation inheres— it would seem to be clear it is this intimate form of interdependency that Coleridge had in mind. This becomes more explicit in our analysis of the poetic function of imagination below. ; 75; In fact it is the perceptive faculty in the commonest sense of that term. At the same time the phenomena with which it works are not objects as objects, "which are essentially fixed and dead" (which would make them unamenable to diffu sion, dissipation, and re-creation), but objects as phenome nal essences which, known intuitively, are readily manipul- able. Therefore, in its own way, secondary imagination is also creative. As in his own credo that critics must support their decisions by reference to fixed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the nature of man, (36) Coleridge grounds the aesthetic definition of his theory of imagination firmly in his brilliant phenomenological analy sis of consciousness. The relationships found to be sub stantive and operative within the philosophical perspective provide not only an implicit prelude and introduction to the aesthetic viewpoint, but also the analogues which show philosophy and art to be so related that "art . . . is 'the middle ground between a thought and a thing.'" In other words, the interrelationship between the philosophical psy chological concept of imagination and the aesthetic imagina tion are indissoluble. Coleridge makes many references to this interrelation ship. At one point he says only half seriously that he would gladly spare himself and his readers the labor of try ing to see the intimate connection between philosophy and 76 art "if I knew how without it to present an intelligible statement of my poetic creed" (53) . And again: My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strict est use of the word, have been in part anticipated in the preceding disquisition on the . . . imagination. (173) And he compares his own area of concern with poetry with that of Wordsworth, who wrote a "masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage,"1 *9 whereas his own interest is with adding the trunk, and even the roots, as far as they lift them selves above the ground and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness. (52) And in this concentration upon the roots, the fadical in sight, the "primary intuition from which every science that lays claim to evidence must take its commencement" (143) , we have one more reminder of similarities between Coleridge's and Husserl's architectonics. But important as these con siderations are to Coleridge, they are most significant as preparation for his analysis of poetic imagination. Aesthetically primary imagination is not only the "prime agent" or projective faculty, i.e., the channel of artistic expression, it is a "repetition in the finite mind **9The reference is to Poems, with a New Preface, 2 vols., 1815, in which Wordsworth challenged Coleridge's dis tinction between fancy and imagination outlined in Omniana. 50Compare Coleridge with Husserl who "viewed his own work as a radicalization of Descartes' demand that all philosophical knowledge be founded in absolutely certain insight, raised above every possibility of doubt," J. J. Kockelmans, "What Is Phenomenology," in Phenomenology, ed. Kockelmans (New York, 1967), p. 25. 77 of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM" (167). In a word, it is that uniquely human characteristic which reveals the spark of divinity in man. As the "living power" of the mind it is "The Logos or communicative intellect" which is shared in differing degree by "Man and Deity" (166). Thus the poet, "described in ideal perfection" (173), more aware of his creative powers than most men,51 exercises his affinity to God in an almost priestly manner when he "brings the whole soul of man into activity" (173), his own and his auditor's. It is in this sense that Cole ridge quotes Milton as saying that poets of genius contemplate the Ancient of Days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprang forth at the first creative fiat. (49) As finite creator the poet celebrates God by participating afresh in the continuous "eternal act of creation." And even as divine creation is an overt expression of a cosmic plan, so poetic expression at a finite level represents cre ative intentionality (noesis). Which is to say, primary imagination as "living power" and "prime agent" parallels in aesthetic function the activity and responsibility accorded to it philosophically. From both perspectives it is the constitutive faculty directed by intentionality. Philo sophically it projects the essential phenomenal experiences 5According to Wordsworth: "endued with a more lively sensibility . . . a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul," "Preface," 1802, Literary Criti cism of W. Wordsworth, ed. Paul M. Zall (Lincoln, Neb., 1966), p. 48. 78 perceived and organized by secondary imagination in the form of qualities (meanings) attributed to selected phenomena;52 aesthetically it expresses the re-created and idealized per ceptions of secondary imagination within the unity of poetic form.5 3 Thus imagination as the "shaping or modifying power" (160) is a synthesis of the respective functions of both primary and secondary imagination in interaction. Not only that, but as we have seen primary imagination through its relationship to reason is vitallyllinked with truth, and in this way poetic truth and ultimate Truth cohere in the presence of poetic expression. Hence the frequent romantic allusion to a correlation between poetry and beauty and truth is rationally justified. 5 * * When Coleridge speaks of the poet as finite creator bringing "the whole soul of man into activity" (173) , he says this is accomplished by subordinating the soul's "fac ulties to each other, according to their relative worth and 52"Every intentional experience . . . is poetic, it is its essential nature to harbor in itself a 'meaning' of some sort, it may be many meanings . . . ." (Ideas, 237). 53"For our continual influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts . . . [and] if we be originally possessed of much organic sensibility . . . we shall de scribe objects and utter sentiments of such a nature and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily.be in some degree enlightened, his taste exalted, and his affections ameliorated," Literary Crit., p. 19. 51*Cf. Literary Criticism of Wordsworth, p. 45. 79 dignity" (174).55 These are obviously qualitative and for mative judgments which involve the activity of primary imag ination. But when he goes on to say that the poet "diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each" (174), he seems to be dealing with an area of activity shared by both primary and secondary imagi nation. For although he writes that it is secondary imagi nation that "dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates," the dif fusion of tone and spirit would seem to involve the projec tive creativity of primary imagination. Or to put it another way, in the aesthetic function of imagination diffu sion is a dual activity, shared in different modes by both primary and secondary imagination. Coleridge continues, describing the synthesizing power of imagination, "first put in action by the will and under standing" (174) , and therefore specifically a function of secondary imagination. It is here "in the balance and rec onciliation of opposite or discordant qualities" (174) , that we encounter the most complete analogy with Husserl's noema. Quoting from Sir John Davies, Coleridge points out that poetic imagination "draws a kind of quintessence from 55Parenthetically, "activity" and "subordination" form another polar pair, the soul's creativity then appearing as a middle state analogous to the position of imagination relative to activity and passivity. 80 things," and we have already noted that for Husserl it is the essences of objective phenomena that are noematically perceived. Just as Coleridge sees secondary imagination as idealizing and unifying the essential perceptions it receives, organizing them in terms of meaning, Husserl describes the "full noema" as consisting of a "nexus of noematic phases," to which the "specific sense-phase" con tributed by the noesis (primary imagination), "supplies only a kind of necessary nucleatic layer" (Ideas, 241). (It is important to recall at this point that the "meanings" which intend the selective and formative noetic functions arise in noema). The full richness of the nexus and the penetrating immediacy of noematic perception are outlined by Husserl: Corresponding at all points to the manifold data of the real (reellen) poetic content, there is a variety of data displayable in really pure (wirklich reiner) intuition, and in a correlative "noematic content," or briefly "noema"— terms which we shall henceforth be continually using. Perception, for instance, has its noema, and at the base of this its perceptual meaning, that is, the per ceived as such. (Ideas, 238) The "perceived as such" is what Haven calls "that flash of intuition in which experience is grasped as a vivid and liv ing whole."56 Husserl describes it as "really pure intui tion" which is "immanent" in the sense that it is immedi ately known in its essential self, i.e., it is truth. In Coleridge's terms the perceptions of secondary imagination include both the essence of the phenomena, and these as 5 6Patterns, p. 163. 81 formalized by primary imagination, and therefore present what appears to be true for the percipient.57 In this con nection it is useful to note Wordsworth's comment in the "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface," (1815), in which he says: The appropriate business of poetry . . . her privilege and her duty, is to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exxst to the senses and the passions.5 8 Here we see at least a partial answer to the problem Haven finds "when we wish to communicate our experiences" of the intuitional flash. Having identified poetic imagination exclusively with secondary imagination and hence linked it to the understanding ("discursive consciousness"), he sees the processes of perception, "dissolving, diffusing, dis sipating in order to re-create," standing between immediate perception and vital expression ("unitive consciousness").59 But as we have seen, primary and secondary imagination are correlate functions of a single activity, the act of percep tion. And since this is a uniquely human faculty, shared in some degree by both poet and his auditors, we can comprehend 57It is true that for the trained phenomenologist using Husserl's methodology the observer is required to set aside the qualitative "coloring" imparted by noesis (epokhd), but this is not the common experience, and will be discussed more fully later. For a more complete description of Husserl's methodology in general and epokhd in particular, cf. Appendix B. 58Lit. Crit. of Wordsworth, p. 160. 59Letters, II, #815, to Matilda Betham [14 March 1811], p. 310. 82 what Coleridge meant when he wrote of "the power of so car rying on the eye of the reader as to make him almost lose consciousness of words." The duality of the poet's percep tions is repeated in the perception of the auditor, who also experiences something akin to "the flash of intuition" which is "grasped as a vivid and living whole." We can see then, that analyzed phenomenologically Cole ridge's theory of imagination on the one hand defines man's perceptive relations with God, and on the other with objec tive reality. Not only are the divine and the mundane both equally necessary to human consciousness, theoretically as well as actually, but this linking resolves the "I am"/"it is" opposition explored by McFarland by showing this to be but an interface between primary and secondary imagination, or noesis and noema. Thus, in Wasserman's words, "art, like the self-knowing subject," is recognizable as "the middle quality between a thought and a thing," or as the bridge which links "nature with that which is exclusively human." When we turn to a consideration of Coleridge's concept of fancy we find it to be especially elusive. Barfield makes a valiant effort to come to grips with it but finds Coleridge's many references to the term, particularly the alternating statements about its differences "in kind" and "in degree" from imagination, difficult to reconcile. And the problem is only partly alleviated when we attempt to establish parallels between Coleridge's and Husserl's usage. 83 Since Husserl almost always uses the word "Phantasie," which readily translates into English as either "imagination" or "fancy," his precise meaning in each passage depends almost entirely upon context, and is sometimes ambiguous as to the distinction between them. However, some similarities between Coleridge and Husserl do clearly emerge. For instance, both writers recognize fancy to be an aspect of memory, and on this basis their definitions can be seen to be closely analogous. In Coleridge's words: Fancy . . . has no other counters to play with but fixi ties and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and place; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice. (167) In another place Coleridge calls it "the aggregative and associative power" (160), which comes close to Husserl's term, "mere fancy."60 In other words, for Coleridge fancy has essentially three functions: it is accumulative; it is memory unrestricted by logical structures of cause and effect; it is selective; and in this sense only does it modify its raw data. In Husserl's Ideas the essential intuitive perception provides the "mere data of fancy" (50); "the process of fancy in general is . . . the 'posit ing' act of representation [to the mind as images], and therefore of remembering in the widest conceivable sense of the term" (285); and selective in response to the intention- 6 0 Ideas, p. 50, passim. 84 ality of perception itself, much as Coleridge sees the "fix ities and definites" of fancy subject to "the phenomenon of the will" in the matter of "choice." Furthermore, Husserl says that fancy induces a "neutrality modification" (282), so that the correlates of perception "repeat those of the unmodified experiences" (283), which parallels Coleridge's notion of the passive fancy. According to Barfield fancy fills two roles: In the first place, then, fancy has its proper and benefi cent place in the genesis of consciousness as a whole and, particularly, in the conversion of perceptions into mem ories. But it is easily debased. In its debased form it is, as passive fancy, more or less identical with pre cisely those characteristics of human perception, which it is the function of imagination (by modifying percep tion) to overcome.61 For Coleridge, then, fancy is basically phenomenologi cal. It is modally akin to the mainly receptive functions of secondary imagination, while being significantly differ ent in not sharing its re-creative activities. Compared to secondary imagination it is distinctly passive, although not totally so, since it is selective and organizing. It is a kind of memory bank, selective of the data received, arrang ing it in relational categories, but largely mechanical and unimaginative. 61p. 87. CHAPTER IV THE NECESSITY OF PARADOX With Wordsworth we encounter the seemingly inherent antitheses and dichotomies of romanticism in their most pro fuse and, often, involuted form. If Coleridge is the major theoretician of a romantic attitude which reveals itself in our century to have been precursive of phenomenology, then Wordsworth is its chief practitioner. Not that Wordsworth was much interested in philosophy as such, nor did he ever fulfill Coleridge's conviction that he was capable of pro ducing "the first genuine philosophical poem."1 In the words of Ernest de Selincourt such an undertaking demanded a philosophic unity . . . which it was not in Wordsworth to supply.2 Nonetheless, the intensive exploration of the nature of his own consciousness, of time, of the natural world, and of the interrelationships among these and other more transcendental matters— which The Prelude and other poems present— clearly demonstrate if not philosophic unity, then at least a degree 1Biographia, p. 275. 2The Prelude, xi. All references to this, poem are to the version of 1805 unless otherwise noted. 85 86 of ontological concern and commitment notably superior to F. R. Leavis1 judgment that Coleridge's proposition was for Wordsworth an ambition that proved unmistakably to be far beyond Wordsworth's powers.3 It is our contention that from the vantage of a post- Husserlian viewpoint Wordsworth is seen to come notably closer to Coleridge's ideal than has usually been allowed. It is in Wordsworth's work that the "reconciliation of oppo site and discordant qualities" in a radically new synthesis is most nearly realized. In fact Wordsworth was as dissatisfied as was Coleridge with the contemporary dualistic philosophical views we have traced to Descartes. In Wordsworth and the Great System, Geoffrey Durrant declares this is an important ingredient in Wordsworth's poetics. He says: The great poetic intensity of this passage [Tintern Abbey, 93-102] arises from the recollection of a struggle of the mind to reconcile the materialist and the idealist account of nature.4 For Wordsworth as for other romantic writers this was the focus of their highly individual but related positions. Earl Wasserman has it that "Wordsworth, trying to look like the philosophic poet Coleridge urged him to be, offers almost every variety of epistemological hypothesis."5 But devaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (New York, 1947), p. 155. 4(Cambridge, 1970), p. 98. 5"The English Romantics: The Grounds of Knowledge," in Studies in Romanticism, IV (1964), p. 23. | 87 for the romantics at least, and Wordsworth specifically, epistemology was but a single perspective of metaphysics, which also raises questions of ontology, of aesthetics, and for Albert Gerard, of social significance. He writes that the young Wordsworth [was] persuaded that the established dichotomies— between spirit and matter in ontological mat ters, between subject and object in the theory of knowl edge, between content and form in the sphere of art— were as unjustifiable and harmful as was the petrified division of society.6 And Herbert Lindenberger notes that "in a general but very real sense" much of Wordsworth's major poetry "attempts to fuse the three realms" of the "political, philosophical, and literary."7 What all these critics seem to be saying in one way or another is that for Wordsworth poetry expresses his consciousness of a cosmos of immense diversity in which every part is inextricably interrelated, of a gestalt, or as Husserl calls it, horizon. It is this multiple yet integra tive view of reality which Whitehead refers to as "exhibit ing entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others."0 That is, the varied areas of concern discoverable in Wordsworth's work reveal his ultimate aim to be the expression of unity; in a word, paradox is with him inherent. This is what Wordsworth, in the Preface to 6English Romantic Poetry (Berkeley, Calif., 1969), p. 3. 7On Wordsworth's Prelude (Princeton, N.J., 1963) , p. 286. 8Science and the Mddern World (New York, 1928), p. 122. 88 the Lyrical Ballads,9 describes as "similitude in disimili tude" (57) , and Coleridge calls "unity in multeity" although it stops short of being a "harmonized chaos."10 It is more nearly akin to the concept illustrated by William Luijpen: "It is not merely the totality [sum of all possible noemata] of the object of perception that has to be stressed, but also the unity of this totality with the entire field of perception.1,11 Wordsworth's most concentrated theoretical statement, the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, covers a wide spectrum of critical perspectives; it has most commonly been read as a kind of manifesto on the poetic use of language. Cole ridge so interpreted it, and attacked it mainly on these grounds.12 Of his many followers, taking the Preface to be primarily a discussion of poetic diction, there have recent ly been some more positive analyses.1 3 In any event, that 9Appearing first with the edition of 1800, its bulk and scope increased with subsequent editions, and it was later buttressed with other essays. All references here are to the Preface of 1802 as found in Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth, ed. Paul M. ZalT (Lincoln, Neb., 1966), unless otherwise noted. 1°0n Poesy as Art. 11 Existential Phenomenology (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1960), p. 99. 12Biographia, p. 169, passim. 1 3Lindenberger, for example, sees it "expressing a principle of decorum" (9), an idea also explored by Renwick (164), W. J. B. Owen, Wordsworth as Critic (Toronto, 1969) says: "Wordsworth's aim is to define a rhetoric . . . as nearly permanent as possible" (4). 89 part of the Preface seeking to define acceptable poetic lan guage is, as Coleridge said, inconsistent with Wordsworth's own best practice even in the Lyrical Ballads, and seems to have almost no relevance for such major poems as The Prelude and Tintern Abbey.1 * * For this reason, and because as we have noted Wordsworth is more practitioner than theoreti cian, it may be useful to look at some key passages in these two poems in relation to the Preface. Significant as the argument on rhetoric is to the Pref ace, we have Wordsworth's emphatic assertion that it is ancillary only to his main purpose, which incidentally does bear directly upon the bulk of his poetry. Near the begin ning of the essay he states that in writing the Lyrical Ballads his "principal object" was to choose incidents and situations from common life . . . and above all [my emphasis], to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature. (40) It is true the lacuna, in this quotation indicated by ellip sis, contains the comment that Wordsworth planned to "relate or describe" these incidents and situations as far as pos sible in "a selection of language really used by men," but in context this is rather obviously a means to the major ontological end of illustrating the "primary laws of our nature" by way of examples culled from commonly recognized 1 ‘ "'I do not believe that the poet did ever himself adopt it in the unqualified sense in which his expressions have been understood" (Biographia, 222). 90 experiences, formed and dramatized by throwing over them "a certain coloring of imagination" (40). In the words of Paul M. Zall, Wordsworth's chief concern is with the capability of poetry to restore man's spiritual powers by bridging the gap between the world about him and the world within.15 But as we have seen, bridging this gap involved the resolu tion of a number of attendant dichotomies. We have noted in both Shelley and Coleridge a shifting back and forth between contrasting or even polar viewpoints. Nowhere is this pattern more characteristic or apparent than in Wordsworth's introspective poems, The Prelude and Tintern Abbey, but here it is not the simple display of alternative perspectives as in Shelley, nor yet an attempt to exhibit "trichotomies" as in Coleridge, although it has affinities with both. It is the intentional presentation of "opposite and discordant qualities," orchestrated to evoke in the auditor a whole phenomenological spectrum of possibilities suggestive of the "multeity in unity" that the human experi ence is. This shifting movement has been much remarked in The Prelude, but has occasioned relatively little comment in its own behalf in Tintern Abbey.16 In the opening lines of 15Introduction, xiii. 16I am particularly indebted to Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (New Haven, Conn., 1964) , and to John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime (London, 1954) for significant insights into the relationship Wordsworth saw as existing between human consciousness and nature. However, I do not necessarily endorse all their views, and those expressed here are my own. 91 this poem there is the subtlest of oscillations between the poet as percipient and the natural scene perceived: Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur.— Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view The plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves 'Mid groves and copses. (1-14) The tone is personal and direct; the poet is the speak er, relaxed, sharing with us an insight into a deeply sub jective experience. But this is only the immediate and sur face, almost the literal, impression. We see this beloved countryside through his eyes: "I see"; "I behold"; "I . . . repose . . . and view these plots." The atmosphere is so intimate as to become almost confessional, a feeling matched by the reiteration of "again" and "once again," which add the recognition of anticipation now more than compensated. But along with this intimate revelation of the poet's most personal responses to the scene (and it becomes a scene rather than mere geography because of his percipience), the scenery itself takes on an almost imperceptible life of its own. It would be easy to overstate this, destroying the effect Wordsworth is working to create. And it is notev i worthy that he here eschews the more dramatic devices of 92 personification and prosopopoeia that for some modern read ers break up the unity of The Prelude, for example. He relies instead on a series of simple, low-key verbs, which lend a subtle air of life, even volition, to natural objects (which I have italicized for clarity and emphasis). Al though it is always the poet's voice that describes the scene, item by item, it is "these steep and lofty cliffs/ That . . . impress/Thoughts of a more deep seclusion," and thus we sense their active participation as "they connect/ The landscape with the . . . sky." It is not simply that the "cottage-plots" are "clad" in summer green, which could be the merest poetic invention, they "lose themselves" as if on purpose in the enveloping fecundity of untamed "groves and copses." Again, while "copse" is a native and local word, "groves" carries a slight freight of classical allu sion to pagan gods and a time when Earth was a living pres ence, a sense that is enhanced in following lines where the farms are called "pastoral." Furthermore, the farms are invisible amid the swelling greenery and these seem to be "houseless woods," where only smoke suggests the presence of man. And Wordsworth further lowers the human impact by toy ing with the idea that perhaps even the smoke is only that of vagrants or a hermit, men least likely to disturb the mute and active life of nature. This pervasive vitality which for Wordsworth seems to be implicit in the intimate awareness he has of nature, is 93 not to be confused with the biological life stirring in the objects of his perception. It has something of the quality which in the twentieth century finds expression among exis tential and phenomenological writers in such terms as the perceived object "presenting" or "manifesting" itself.17 However, although it has an air of being inherent, it is not autonomous; it is always an attribution of the poet.18 Thus it is not so much a description of an aspect of objective reality, as an attempt to delineate emblematically the rela tionship he conceives of as existing between himself and the phenomenal world. This is what Geoffrey Hartman calls "the dialectic of love between man and nature."19 In these opening lines Wordsworth gently shifts our attention from himself as speaker to some object or aspect of the natural scene, then back to himself, and again to some phenomenon. By interweaving images and syntax in this way he unostentatiously builds a sense of the absolute "interfusion" he sees operative between perceiver and per- 17For example, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Phenomenology (New York, 1967): "The person thinking is 'interested' in the objects of his thought; they attract him [my emphasis] . . . To be interested or to be attracted by an object brings with it that the object which is attracting me is accepted as it presents itself; it 'imposes' itself on the observer" (64). 18"What is distinctive in the poetry of Wordsworth . . . is not the attribution of life and soul to nature, but the repeated formulation of this outer life as a contribu tion of . . . the life and soul of man the observer" (M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, New York, 1958, p. 64) . 1 9Wordsworth's Poetry, p. 8. 94 ceived. This not only sets and maintains the tone of the poem, but prepares the reader for the revelation of yet more intimate insights. Read in this way the passage lulls us into receptivity of the premise he is working toward: that man is best able to "see into the life of things," i.e., to experience his own essential self (soul), when he allows his love and understanding of his affinity with all of nature to soothe him into a "serene and blessed mood" where even his bodily functions become "almost suspended," and he enters into harmony with all living things. From here Wordsworth then moves on to the major, perhaps the only, philosophical thesis of the poem: the phenomena of perception are the result of a process which, while instigated by the mind, is jointly shared in by both man and nature. In this recogni tion lies the poet's joy in all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,— both what they half create, And what perceive. (105-107) The phrase, "half create," should not cause confusion here; it does not involve an internal contradiction with what has gone before. It is not a mathematical evaluation of precise equality of function of mind and nature in the joint enterprise of perceptive creativity. It is acknowl edgement, couched in the conversational tone of the poem, of the mind's need of its correlates in objective reality.20 20"Consciousness is always consciousness of something," Luijpen. 95 Creativity ex nihilo is totally foreign to Wordsworth's thought. Coleridge wrote that "the sole reality of things" lies in an "absolute identity of subject and object," which is called "nature, and which in its highest power is nothing else but self-conscious will or intelligence."21 And W. I. Renwick echoes this notion in his assessment of Wordsworth: For him there was no question of subject and object— him self and his natural surroundings— were one within a greater unity which is the theme for all his poetry and the center of his contemplation.22 But this would seem to be an oversimplification in the case of Wordsworth. There is a passage in Tintern Abbey, which if taken out of context might appear to support such a reading: I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. (93-102) It is necessary to closely identify the actor and the acted upon. It is the poet who is disturbed "with the joy/Of ele vated thoughts," but at the same time there is the tacit recognition that nature, intuitively perceived, is more than an array of mere objects, what Theodore Roszak calls "the 2 ^iographia, p. 155. 22English Literature, 1789-1815 (London, 1963), p. 158. 96 sacramental vision of nature."23 The otherwise unidentified "presence," "motion," "spirit," is not a personification, not an autonomous force working on man and nature, nor is it nature itself. It is a pervasive something uniting man and nature and shared by both as it "rolls through all things." All the same, only the poet consciously feels it; only he is spurred to "elevated thoughts" about it and its meaning. Indeed, as Wordsworth is well aware, the meaning he gropes for must come from himself as perceptor as he senses his unity with all the world about him, of which he is also a part. It is another perspective of the creative act which cannot come into being except as an interrelation between himself and his world. And embedded within it lies a recog nition which becomes more clearly manifest in The Prelude; that in the same act of intensive perception that brings him closest to uncovering the essence of nature itself, he also comes closest to realizing his own essential self.2* 1 This inseparable interrelation of the definition of self in and through the act of perception, is fundamentally phenomenono- logical, as comparison with a key statement of Edmund Husserl's shows. He writes in Cartesian Meditations; 2 3Where the Wasteland Ends (Garden City, N.Y., 1972), p. 315. 21*"When Wordsworth depicts an object he is also depict ing himself, or, rather, a truth about himself, a self acquired revelation" (Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, p. 5). Also see Frederick Garber, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Encounter, passim. 97 Objects exist for me, and are for me what they are, only as objects of actual and possible consciousness . . . [and] the transcendental ego (in the psychological paral lel, the psyche) is what it is solely in relation to intentional objectivities.25 Whether or not Wordsworth was fully aware of the philosophi cal implications of this relationship is unimportant; there is no doubt he was alive to its usefulness as a method of poetic exposition. In Book III of The Prelude, summing up the story of his life to the point of his early days at Cam bridge, he says: Of Genius, Power, Creation and Divinity itself I have been speaking, for my theme has been What pass'd within me. Not of outward things Done visibly for other minds, words, signs, Symbols or actions; but of my own heart Have I been speaking, and my youthful mind. (171-177) Our comprehension of this single most significant element in the structure of The Prelude is necessary to understanding of the total meaning of the poem, and of Wordsworth's aesthetic. In The Prelude, perhaps in part because he felt the pressure of Coleridge's insistence on a "philosophic poem,"26 Wordsworth is more overt, more emphatic in his 25(The Hague, Netherlands, 1960), p. 65. Kockelmans expands on this: "Husserl distinguishes these two direc tions of reflection as the 'noetic' and the 'noematic' aspects of the intentional relation; the former refers to the subject-in-relation-to-the-object, the latter to the object-in-relation-to-the-subject. These two aspects of the intentional relation are strictly correlative, they deter mine each other, and each can only be understood in the light of the other" (Phenomenology, p. 67) . 2 eTable Talk, July 31, 1832, and in many other places. 98 presentation of the interrelatedness of mind with the phe nomenal world.27 And additional elements creep in as he seeks to refine and clarify the complexity he finds in both these elements and in their relationship.28 As has been established in many critical studies, Wordsworth's views are deeply rooted in the eighteenth century, and it is tempting to see in the alternating emphases of The Prelude, sometimes directed to the primacy of mind, as often to nature as teacher or nurse, the vacillation of a man caught between the competing traditions of the past— empiricist and ideal ist— and his own and/or Coleridge's reaching toward a new synthesis.29 And undoubtedly these influences were real enough, contributing their share to Wordsworth's thought and to the final form of the poem. But as with other romantic writers, a study of the background and sources alone is mis leading, restrictive, and in the final analysis falls short 27"We might think of The Prelude as Wordsworth's way of giving objective form to highly subjective states, or to put it another way, of his effort to create an external reality for his private transcendental world" (Lindenberger, p. 6). 28"Whereas the eighteenth century poet took it for granted that we perceive and sought by collateral accretions to give percepts value, Wordsworth invested with value the very act of experience" (Wasserman, p. 337). 29We shall not explore here the traces of Wordsworth's so-called mysticism since it is highly controversial and seems to us largely irrelevant to this study. However, some awareness of it is a significant modifier. Hartman states flatly: "He is no mystic" (Wordsworth's Poetry, p. 350), and Durrant rejects Garrod's interpretation of the "Lucy" poems, in The Profession of Poetry, as offering "gratuitous aid to those who dismiss Wordsworth as eccentric or fey" (p. 10). 99 of revealing the reach of Wordsworth's vision, or the richness of his uniqueness. The shifting perspectives of The Prelude are probably too well-known to need extensive rehearsal here; a very few examples illustrative of the limited subject under review; the philosophy revealed in their poetic relationship, will likely be sufficient. Just how dramatic the shifts may be is vividly shown by the oft-quoted juxtaposition in Book III: I was as wakeful, even, as waters are To the sky's motion; in a kindred sense Of passion was as obedient as a lute That waits upon the touches of the wind. (135-138) Which is immediately followed by: yet I was most rich, I had a world about me; 'twas my own, I made it; for it only liv'd to me, And to the God who look'd into my mind. (141-144) Out of context, or if the context is given insufficient attention, these lines seem to present a flat contradiction to each other, so complete as to cancel the possibility of compromise, much less of synthesis. And yet it is something much more than synthesis that Wordsworth seeks, and I believe, accomplishes. It is definition of man's creative imagination in and through the process of recognizing its own total and inseparable correlation with the world of which it is a part. From the standpoint of this study it is poetic exposition of the core argument of philosophic phenomenology. 100 "My voice proclaims," writes Wordsworth in the Preface to The Excursion, How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external World Is fitted:— and how exquisitely, too— Theme this but little heard of among men— The external World is fitted to the Mind; And the creation (by no lower name Can it be called) which they with blended might Accomplish:— this is our high argument. (63-71) In quoting part of the same passage John Jones asserts that "Wordsworth is arguing not for the primacy of mind, but for a partnership between the mind and the external world."30 But he goes on to illustrate his point with the lines from The Prelude, Book II, in which the mind is said to be creator and receiver both, Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds. (273-275) Whether or not "primacy" is at issue here, there is no ques tion the mind is the instigator of the relationship, serving in the dual role of "creator" (noesis) and "receiver both" (noema), the "alliance" being their correlation. Were we poetically crass enough to substitute "perceives" for "be holds" in the last line, the phenomenological nature of the statement would be very nearly complete.31 This is the theme which is repeated with variations at many points in the poem. Acknowledging the vital role of the phenomenal world as 30The Egotistical Sublime, p. 41. 31 Compare with extended exegesis in Appendix B. 101 correlate of the creative mind, Wordsworth admits that "the external universe/By striking upon what is found within" (VIII, 766-767), provides the raw data of perception. On occasion the press of impressions may be such as to seem to usurp the agency of the mind itself as, upon entering London for the first time he cries: "Great Godl/That aught exter nal to the living mind/Should have such mighty sway" (VIII, 700-702). But this is not a function of objective reality so much as a psychological result of imagination working overtime in anticipation, and being suddenly made concrete. For he says, although he was not usually much influenced by "extrinsic transitory accidents," in this instance he was overwhelmed by "a sense/Of what had been here done," and the effect was like that of an "independent nature" (VIII, 780, 781-782, 786). However, this is appearance only; actually it was "individual remembrances" which, "By working on the shapes before my eyes/Became like vital functions of the soul" (788-789), and once again we are reminded that the originating agency is the creative consciousness. Or the respective roles of mind and nature can become confused in the opposite sense, and objects may seem to owe their essential being to a whim of the mind. Sometimes, writes Wordsworth, "I forgot/That I had bodily eyes, and what I saw/Appear'd like something in myself, a dream/A prospect in my mind" (II, 368-371). This difficulty arises from youthful inability to yet clearly distinguish the inti 102 mate but distinct functions within the mind/nature relation ship. Looking backward to this time the mature poet can find satisfaction in recalling that "at least/. . . I still retain'd/My first creative sensibility/That by the regular action of the world/My soul was unsubdu'd" (II, 377-381). Excepting in such unusual circumstances, and certainly "By uniform control of after years" (II, 277), we gradually learn to know we come closest to assuming our true humanity when we recognize that "virtue" chiefly lurks Among those passages of life in which We have had deepest feeling that the mind Is lord and master, and that outward sense Is but the obedient servant of her will. (XI, 269-273) And even amid the magnificence of the Alps, after the apocalyptic vision in the Simplon Pass, Wordsworth is pleased to remember that he had been awed but Not prostrate, overborn, as if the mind Itself were nothing, a mean pensioner On outward forms. (VI, 666-668) What Wordsworth seeks, then, is to establish the terms of a "partnership" (Jones, above) between man's creative consciousness and its phenomenal world. This is a partner ship, phenomenologically speaking, in which creative mind (imagination) and its objective world (horizon) need each other in the most literal sense that as subject and object neither can exist independently of the other; they are in 103 fact meaningless except as correlates of an encounter.32 Furthermore, meaning— i.e., qualitative judgment— is inter jected into the encounter by the mind (noesis), and recog nized and evaluated in the act of perception (noema). In this meeting of opposites the essential nature of each is revealed in and through the perceptive act, an act of inten- tionality originating in the mind.3 3 Wordsworth himself describes the process as a wedding between "the discerning intellect of man" and "this goodly universe," consummated "in love and holy passion."34 And again he speaks of That spirit of religious love in which I walked with nature. (II, 376-377) It is a willing union, so complete that in it he has an intuition, an immediate awareness of the mind/nature rela tionship. 35 Thus the dual revelation of the inmost spirit of nature and of his own soul, resulting from poetic sensi tivity imaginatively at work in acts of perception, becomes 32"Encounter" needs some qualification as used here: it does not carry the implication of confrontation, although an undertone of challenge is unavoidable and perhaps desir able. Wordsworth speaks of "interfusion," but this is the end of the process, ultimate unity of mind and nature, rather than description of the occasion. 33Lindenberger notes Wordsworth's "unique method of portraying the interworking of physical with mental phenom ena, of the external, observable world with the hidden inner world" (p. 42). 34Preface to The Excursion (50-54). 35"Wordsworth thought of imaginative work primarily as the discovery of hitherto unapprehended relations" (Jones, p. 44). 104 for Wordsworth a fundamentally religious experience, arising in love. Joseph J. Kockelmans writes of Husserl that "ultimately he saw the imagination as the essential factor in the revealing of the essences of things."36 As we have seen, this is equally true of Wordsworth almost two centuries earlier. Both men saw that the interrelationship of crea tive consciousness with its phenomenal world is the radical principle underlying epistemology on the one hand, and ontology on the other. Wordsworth went further, recognizing in the noetico/noematic act of perception a paradigm for poetic composition, i.e., a keystone of his aesthetic. In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads he posits "cer tain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind," which stand opposite, as it were, to "certain powers in the great and permanent objects . . . which are equally inherent and indestructible" (44). 3 7 The terms, "great and permanent objects," and the "powers" inherent in them seem vaguely ambiguous here, particularly in view of their usage in other contexts. But since the objects are "permanent," they would seem to be not phenomena of nature so much as natural principles, and since Wordsworth insists again and again on the creative activity of the mind, the "powers" appear to be potentials for interrelationships. He speaks in The Prelude of "that universal power/And fitness in the 36Phenomenology, pp. 81-82. 37Zall, p. 28. 105: latent qualities/And essences of things, by which the mind/ Is mov'd" (II, 343-346), which sounds like a paraphrase. And he adds, stirred as he was by emanations of these latent powers, "my soul was unsubdu'd" (381), and "I still retain'd /My first creative sensibility" (378-379). Wordsworth sum marizes his views of the interrelationship existing between man and "general nature" as "this great consummation," in the Preface to The Excursion. For How exquisitely the individual mind . . . to the external world Is fitted:— and how exquisitely, too, Theme this but little heard of among men, The external world is fitted to the mind. (63-68) It is the poet with his "more lively sensibility . . . and a more comprehensive soul than are supposed to be common among mankind" (48), who has the primary responsibility for revealing to other men "that beauty which unfolds itself, not to his eye as it sees carelessly the things which cannot possibly go unseen, . . . but to the thinking mind; which searches, discovers, and treasures up,— infusing by medita tion into the objects with which it converses an intellec tual life."38 For "of genius in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the widening of the sphere of human sen sibility, for the delight, honor, and benefit of human nature."39 Wordsworth sought to show the "hidden beauty" of man's creative consciousness. 38Reply to "Mathetes," Zall, p. 88. 39Essay, Supplementary to the Preface," Zall, p. 184. 106 He writes: The powers requisite for the production of poetry are, first, those of observation and description, i.e., the ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in themselves, and with fidelity to describe them, unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the describer: whether the things depicted be actually pres ent to the senses, or have a place only in the memory. (140) Thus the poet is charged to be aware of phenomena "as they are in themselves," to be cognizant of their essential nature, unmodified by judgments arising from experience. For Wordsworth says he "considers man and nature as essen tially adapted to each other" (52), and therefore, in prob ing for the essences of the objects of his thought, the poet establishes both the relationship of man with his world, and illuminates man's "universal passions." If the poet does "not write for poets alone, but for men" (54), and if he would produce "a class of poetry . . . well adapted to interest mankind permanently" (39), he must appeal to man "not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer or a natural philosopher, but as a man" (50). For the "primary laws of our nature" are intimately related to "the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men," which again are connected with our moral sentiments and animal sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the operations of the elements and the appearances of the visible universe; with storm and sunshine, with the revolutions of the seasons, with cold and heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with injuries and resentments, gratitude and hope, with fear and sorrow. (5 4) These1 are the "great and universal passions" which consti 107 tute the essence of the human experience. Therefore, by seeking the essential nature within the objects of his con scious thought, "the things as they are in themselves," the poet establishes the relation of man to his world even as he illuminates man's fundamental and "universal passions." In this insistence on the significance of objective essence Wordsworth preempts Husserl's call to "confront the 'thing in itself,' " **0 behind whose concept of imaginative acts "there correspond as original sources of the reasoned justification that support them certain intuitions" which are "primordial" (Ideas, 45). These are pure essences of eidos "in the data of experience, data of perception, memory and so forth" (50), or as Wordsworth would say: "truth." And just as Husserl saw essences as being obscured and over laid by predicative judgments ("presuppositions") based on experience and expectation, so Wordsworth notes the criti cally blunting effect of "that most dreadful enemy . . . our own pre-established codes of decision" (10). Geoffrey Hartman has pointed out in his study of Tin- tern Abbey that "poetry does not deal with relations, but with the totality of a relation, with identities."1 *1 That is, the object of perception which becomes symbolic in the poem, in this case the river Wye, assumes totally the weight of the poet's identity; it becomes for us "the cogito, This **0 Phenomenology, p. 29. ^The Unmediated Vision (New York, 1966), p. 44. 108 river: I am.1 1 As we have seen the definition of self takes place for Wordsworth within the perceptive act which uncov ers the reality of the phenomenal object. Hence the possi bility of "interfusion" or total identity, but only if the essence or true identity of the object is accomplished. Which is why Wordsworth can assert: "I have wished to keep my reader in the company of flesh and blood," and "I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject, con sequently, I hope that there is in these poems little false hood of description" (45). Essence is truth is correlation. And that is why he may aspire to explore through his poetry, "truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature" (40). But paradoxically, the need for openness to the essen tial only arises as a realization in the aftermath of expe rience. And it is experience that noetically determines our presuppositions. How then is a primordial level of con sciousness to be attained? Husserl's answer was the devel opment of sophisticated two-stage methodology: first, the elimination of conscious presuppositions in the perceptor ("transcendental reduction"), followed by setting aside of values esoterically awarded to the object ("eidetic reduc tion") . Together these constitute epokhe. **2 Wordsworth was much more simple and direct: he posited the need to recapture in recollection that immediate intui- lt2cf. Appendix B. 109 tion of the world, free of judgment, which is the preroga tive of childhood. This is acceptance of that which is, innocent of presupposition born of experience. And it was exactly this quality which Coleridge praised as Wordsworth's ability to carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar: With sun and moon and stars throughout the year And man and woman; this is the character and privilege of genius 3 However this may be, philosophy is not poetry. "This power," writes Wordsworth, to perceive the essences of things, though indispensable to a poet, is one which he employs only in submission to necessity, and never for a contin uance of time; as its exercise supposes all the higher qualities of the mind to be passive, and in a state of subjection to external objects. (140) Reasserting the active role of the creative mind, Wordsworth sees his task as one of "throwing over" his insights "a certain coloring of imagination" (40). Although perception of essences is indispensable to the poet and provides the basic ground for poetic truth, the expression of his percep tive intuition (which it is the function of "imagination and fancy to modify, to create, and to associate" [141]), must be of "things not as they are, but as they appear." In the "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" (1815), he expands on * * 3Biographia, p. 49. 110 this belief: The appropriate business of poetry . . . her appropriate employment, her privilege and her duty, is to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses and to the passions. * * * * For this is the common human experience. All men share in some more or less rudimentary way the poet's intuition into the relation of things, a hazy apperception of their own intimate interrelationship with nature. Custom tends to blunt this awareness in most men, but it continues to form a common ground to which the poet can appeal. Consciously intending noesis— imaginatively colored and formed— he can thus share his vision with other men whose "senses" and "passions"— and perceptions— are much like his own, if less acute. To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these sympathies in which without any other discipline than that of our daily life we are fitted to take delight, the poet principally directs his attention. (52) It is his duty to restore to mankind their familiarity with what Leavis has called "ultimate sanctions."1 *5 Wordsworth writes in a letter to John Wilson that a great poet ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings, to give them a new conception of feelings, to render their feelings more sane, pure, and permanent, in short, more consonant to nature, and the great moving spirit of things.4 6 1 *1 *Essay, Zall, p. 160. * * devaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (New York, 1947), p. 165. 1,6Zall, p. 72. Ill These are the fundamentals upon which human dignity is founded, and consequently it is the poet's responsibility to present his vision powerfully and truthfully in terms that are comprehensible because they are the general experience. This is the justification he seeks for the attempt to util ize a "language really used by men" (40). For the poet has to share his perception "in life's everyday appearances" of a world Whence spiritual dignity originates, Which do both give it being and maintain A balance, an ennobling interchange Of action from without and from within; The excellence, pure function, and best power Both of the object seen, and the eye that sees. (XII, 369-378) This is the "natural and unalienable inheritance" which all men dimly perceive as being theirs. It is the duty and the privilege of the poet to present his vision so that "all human beings (may] join with him" in celebrating "the pres ence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion" (52) . B I B L I O G R A P H Y 112 A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York, 1958. Wordsworth: A Collection of Critical Essays Englewood cliffs, N.J., 1972. Appleyard, J. A. Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature. Cambridge, Mass., 1965. Bannan, John F. The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. New York 1967. Barfield, Owen. What Coleridge Thought. Middletown, Conn. 3.971.. Bate, W. J. Coleridge. New York, 1968. _. "Romantic Transcendentalism and the Organic view of Nature," Criticism: The Major Texts. New York, 1952. Beach, J. W. The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth Century Poetry. New York, 1970. Beer, J. B. Coleridge the Visionary. London, 1959. Bernbaum, S. A Guide Through the Romantic Movement. New York, 1930-1948. Bradley, A. C. "Shelley's View of Poetry," The Oxford Lec tures on Poetry. London, 1909. Bush, Douglas. Myth and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry. New York, 1937. Coe, Richard. Contemporary Critical Method, Ideology, Sci ence and Reality. Unpubl. diss. (Univ. of Calif, at San Diego, l97l). Coleridge, S. T. Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross. 2 voIs. London, 1907. 113 114 Coleridge, S. T. Biographia Literaria, ed. G. Watson. Lon don, 1956. Complete Works, ed. B. E. Rooke. Prince- ton, N.J., 1969. Letters, ed. Earl L. Griggs. 2 vols. Oxford, 1956-71. _________________ . Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn. 2 vols. New York, 1957. Curran, Stuart. Shelley's Cenci. Princeton, N.J., 1970. Curtis, Jared R. Wordsworth's Experiments with Tradition. Ithaca, N.Y., l97l. Darbishire, Helen. The Poet Wordsworth. London, 1950. Durrant, Geoffrey. Wordsworth and the Great System. Cam bridge, 1970. Elton, Oliver. A Survey of Romantic Literature (1780-1830). London, 1950. Fogle, Richard H. The Idea of Coleridge's Criticism. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962. Frye, Northrop. A Study of English Romanticism. Toronto, 1968. Garber, Frederick. Wordsworth and the Poetry of Encounter. Urbana, 111., 1971. Garrod, H. W. The Profession of Poetry. London, 1929. Wordsworth: Lectures and Essays. London, 1927-49. Gdrard, Albert S. English Romantic Poetry. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968. Gledsner, Robert, and Gerald E. Enscoe. Romanticism: Points of View. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970. Golden, Morris. The Self Observed. Baltimore, Md., 1972. Graff, Gerald. Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma. Evans ton, 111., 1970. Gurwitsch, Aron. "Husserl's Theory of Intentionality of Consciousness in Historical Perspective," Phenomenology 115 and Existentialism, ed. Edward N. Lee and Maurice Man- delbaum. Baltimore, Md., 1967. Gurwitsch, Aron. "Intentionality, Constitution, and Inten tional Analysis," Phenomenology, Joseph J. Kockelmans. Garden City, N.Y., 1967. Hartman, Geoffrey H. The Unmediated vision. New York, 1956 . ______________________. Wordsworth's Poetry: 1781-1814. New Haven, Conn., 1964. Haven, Richard. Patterns of Consciousness. Boston, 1969. Havens, Raymond D. The Mind of a Poet. 2 vols. Baltimore, Md., 1941. Hazlitt, William. Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe. New York, 196 7. Herford, C. H. The Age of Wordsworth. London, 1925. Hobbes, Thomas. Collected Works in English, ed. Wm. Moles- worth. Aalen, Ger., 1962. Houtchens, L. H. and C. W. English Romantic Poets and Essayists. New York, 1966. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague, 1969. Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. London, 1962 . _________________ . Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philoso phy, trans. Quentin Lauer. New York, 1965. _________________ . Phenomenology of Internal Time Conscious ness , ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. James S. Churchill. Bloomington and London, 1966. _________________ . "Prolegomena to Pure Logic," Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay. London, 1970. Jackson, J. R. deJ. Method and Imagination in Coleridge's Criticism. New Haven, Conn., 1969. Jones, John. The Egotistical Sublime. London, 1954. Kaelin, E. F. "Notes Toward an Understanding of Heidegger's Aesthetics," Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. 116 Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum. Baltimore, Md., 1967. Keats, John. Letters, ed. Hyder E. Rollins. 2 vols. New York, 1958. Poems, ed. Ernest de Selincourt. London, 1954. Kermode, Frank. The Romantic Image. New York, 1957. King-Hele, Desmond. Shelley: His Thought and Work. New York, 1971. Knight, G. Wilson. The Starlit Dome. London, 1959. Kockelmans, Joseph J. Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation. Garden City, N.Y., 1967. Koszul, A. H. Shelley's Prose in the Bodleian. London, 1910. Lea, F. A. Shelley and the Romantic Revolution. Pitts burgh , Pa., 1945-60. Leavis, F. R. Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry. London, 1936. Lindenberger, Herbert. On Wordsworth's Prelude. Princeton, N.J., 1963. Lovejoy, Arthur 0. The Great Chain of Being. New York, 1936. Luijpen, William. Existential Phenomenology. Pittsburgh, Pa., 1960. __________________ . Phenomenology and Humanism. Pittsburgh, Pa., 1966. __________________ , and Henry J. Koren. A First Introduction to Existential Phenomenology. Pittsburgh, Pa., 1969. Margoliouth, H. M. Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1795-1834. New York, 1966. McElderry, Bruce, Jr., ed. Shelley's Critical Prose. Lin coln, Neb., 1967. McFarland, Thomas. Coleridge and the Pantheistic Tradition. London, 1969. 117 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. New York, 1962. Muirhead, J. H. Coleridge as Philosopher. New York, 1954. Orsini, G. N. G. Coleridge and German Idealism. Carbon- dale, 111., 1 J&T. Owen, W. J. B. Wordsworth as Critic. Toronto, 1969. Perkins, David. English Romantic Writers. New York, 1967. Prickett, Stephen. Coleridge and Wordsworth. Cambridge, 1970. Pulos, C. E. The Deep Truth. Lincoln, Neb., 1954. Raysor, T. S. The English Romantic Poets. New York, 1956- 66. Renwick, W. I. English Literature, 1789-1815. London, 1963. Roszak, Theodore. Where the Wasteland Ends. Garden City, N.Y., 1972. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York, 1549. Selincourt, Ernest de, ed. Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth; The Middle Years. London, 193 7. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Complete Works, ed. Thomas Hutchin son. London, 1934. Tillotson, Geoffrey. Criticism and the Nineteenth Century. Hamden, Conn., 1967. Thompson, A. W. Wordsworth1s Mind and Art. New York, 1970. Walsh, William. Coleridge; The Work and the Relevance. New York, 1967. Wasserman, Earl R. "The English Romantics; The Grounds of Knowledge," Studies in Romanticism, IV, 1964,23-24. Shelley; A Critical Reading. Balti- more, Md., T971. The Subtler Language. Baltimore, Md., ism-------- 118 Weitz, Morris. Philosophy in Literature. Detroit, Mich., 1963. Welleck, R£n£. "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary His tory," Comparative Literature, I, 1949/ 45-61. _______________. Discriminations. New Haven, Conn., 1970. _______________. The History of Modern Criticism. New Haven, Conn., T955. Weisford, Enid. Salisbury Plain: A Study in the Develop ment of Wordsworths Mind and Art. New York, 1966. Wesling, Donald. Wordsworth and the Adequacy of Language. New York, 19 70. Whitehead, Alfred N. Science and the Modern World. New York, 1928. Wordsworth, William. Literary Criticism of ---, ed. Paul M. Zall. Lincoln, Neb., 1966. The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Helen Darbishire. London, 1960. a p p e n d i x e s 119 APPENDIX A APPENDIX A Philosophical phenomenology is both an inclusive theory of existence, and a methodology for applying that theory to the existential and relational world of man. It is pri marily epistemological and ontological. Beginning with the limited aim of establishing a clear description of the essential reality underlying thought, "an absolutely valid knowledge of things,"1 a firm and incon- testible ground upon which science and philosophy itself might confidently erect their theoretical and speculative structures, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) soon found himself involved with what eventually became an "insight into the nature of consciousness as the universal medium of access to whatever exists for us and is considered by us as valid."2 Nor does even this limitless panorama of knowledge exhaust the phenomenological field of concern, for the very act of perception which realizes the phenomenal world (or, more accurately, some perspective of it) also establishes the Joseph J. Kockelmans, "What Is Phenomenology?" in Phe nomenology; The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Inter pretation, ed. Kockelmans (New York, 1967), p. 26. 2Aron Gurwitsch, "Husserl's Theory of the Intentional- ity of Consciousness in Historical Perspective," in Phenome nology and Existentialism, eds. Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum (Baltimore, Md., 1967), p. 30. 121 122 validity of the subjective perceptor, the conscious ego, i.e., cogito,3 man's knowing self, the essential man. The general theory of Husserl's phenomenology, stripped of his many and elaborate analytical examples, can best be approached by way of the analysis and definition of a rela tively few key terms. BEING: Following Descartes there are in the phenomenologi cal view basically two main modes of being: mate riality, and consciousness which is revealed existentially. The world of things is material, commensurate, relatively permanent, autonomous, and therefore implicitly prior to its conscious recognition by man. Factually, however, knowledge of this world is contingent upon its perception, and it too has only an existential being in human terms. Corporeally man is a part of this material world, but he is also the bearer of consciousness, which is insubstantial, individ ually impermanent, and incapable of independent being since it is "always and of necessity consciousness of something— namely, of something which is not consciousness itself. Conscious man is thus inherently subjective, and his rela tionship with the material world (and with all phenomena, i.e., with anything which may be the object of thought) is a subject/object encounter. "The subject who man is, then, is 3Edmund Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York, 1962), pp. 93 and 104. ‘ ‘William Luijpen, Existential Phenomenology (Pitts burgh, Pa., 1960), p. 2TTT 123 not an Absolute Subject but an 'existent' subject. Man as subject is 'existence.'"5 Or to put it another way, to be man is "to-be-in-the-world" (Dasein6), for "there is no mode of being-man which can be described without being obliged to name the world in the description."7 At the same time a world without man is unthinkable— literally— for that would presuppose the withdrawal of man from the world, "a with drawal which would include also . . . the thinking presence of the existent subject."8 Objective reality is only pos sible as the result of subjective perception of it; which is to say: consciousness and its world are correlative to each other, distinguishable but inseparable. Of the phenomenal world Husserl said: "Its esse consists exclusively in its 'percipi,"'9 a remark echoing a statement Coleridge made in the Biographia.10 Consciousness and materiality (or the phenomenal world more generally) represent a "dialectical unity."11 ESSENCE: The concept of essence (Eidos) is central to phe nomenology. All phenomena— including man himself , — physical, mental, spiritual, imaginary, illusory, hypo- sLuijpen and Henry J. Koren, A First Introduction to Existential Phenomenology (Pittsburgh, 1969) , p. J3T 6Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tubingen, Ger., 1949), pp. 41-43. 7Luijpen, p. 19. 8L. and Koren, p. 41. 9Ideas, p. 265. 1 0p. 68. lxLuijpen, p. 37. ............................... 124 thetical, etc., actual, probable, possible, etc., present, recollected, and so on, have an essential core which uniquely distinguishes their peculiar "thingness" from all other things. This is their "true" self, divorced of evaluative judgments arising from experience, custom, etc. The correlation between man and his phenomenal world is an essential relationship; i.e., the "primitive fact" of phe nomenology is the encounter in which essential man (ego, consciousness) perceives intuitively the essential "naked beauty"1 2 manifested. Or to put it another way, man ("being-conscious-in-the world"1 3) becomes directly aware of "the-thing-as-it-is-in-itself." INTENTIONALLY: "Experiencing an act [of perception], the subject is aware of an object, so that the act may be characterized, as Husserl does, as a conscious ness of an object."11* "Perceiving consciousness is never closed, wrapped up in itself."15 Each act of perception reveals one perspective of a given phenomenon from a spe cific vantage point. Each phenomenon is existentially a conglomerate of a potentially infinite number of perspec tives; the phenomenological world is the totality of all possible perspectives of all possible phenomena ("horizon"). Since consciousness is always "consciousness of something 12Shelley, The Defence of Poetry. 13Luijpen, p. 51. 1^Kockelmans, p. 119. 15Luijpen, p. 92. 125; other than itself," "it is directedness to what conscious ness itself is not, i.e., it is intentional,"16 it is "the subject himself involved in the world."17 In other words, the act of perception originates in the expectation of there being an object to be perceived, and furthermore, experience leads the subject to presuppose certain qualities and values as inherent in the phenomena perceived. Thus perception is intentional in two ways: it is selective of its objects from the total horizon of phenomena available to it, and it anticipates certain associated characteristics. That is, with some modification due to situation, viewpoint, etc., perception tends to "see" what it intends to "discover." "In perceiving we are directed to the thing perceived, in remembering we are directed to the thing recalled, or in loving or hating to the person loved or hated, and the like."18 In any single act of perception the object "which is intended"1 9 is perceived from the standpoint of a partic ular perspective chosen from the infinity of possible per spectives ("object as it is intended"20). NOESIS and NOEMA: Perception then is an act of conscious ness, an active correlation, the duality which is existence. (This is distinct from the dual rela tionship: noted above, that of the object as it actually 1 7L. and Koren, p. 61. 19Ibid., p. 45. 20Ibid. 16Ibid., p. 93. 1 0Gurwitsch, p. 43. 126 exists in itself [essence], and the object as it manifests itself to the conscious awareness of the perceiving subject [intentionality]). It also involves a duality in another sense: the perceptive act both projects an intended image of the object, and receives an impression of the object which more or less corresponds to expectation (presupposi tion) . In the most minimal terms this latter duality is that which Husserl calls "noesis and noema."21 This concept becomes clearer through an illustration from his text, Ideas: Keeping this table steadily in view as I go round it, changing my position in space all the time, I have contin ually the consciousness of the bodily presence out there of this one and self-same table, which in itself remains unchanged throughout. But the perception of the table is one that changes continuously, it is a continuum of chang ing perceptions. (Section 41, p. 117) And each of this series of perceptions has a distinctive act (noesis), and a distinctive object as_ intended. "It is the latter notion which we identify with meaning."22 But how can we be sure that meaning (or value) derives from the act of perception, rather than inhering in the object itself? Successive acts of perception directed at the same object from the same standpoint reveal a repetition of virtually identical meanings; but if they take place from different perspectives they result in different meanings. Which is to say, if the meanings inhered in the object itself a change of standpoint would not cause a change of meaning, since the 21 Ideas, Section 88. 22Gurwitsch, p. 45. 127 object remains itself at all times. Correspondingly, many distinctive meanings resulting from as many perspectives show that "none of the meanings coincide with the object."23 Since we do "discover" meanings in the objects of our acts of perception, it must be concluded that we impart them our selves. At the most basic level the object as it manifests itself is "noema." In fact each perceptual act gives rise to a single "adumbrational presentation"24 or noema. The perceptual noema is therefore distinguished from the object as_ it is intended (noesis), and from the object itself which might be experienced from an infinity of dif fering perspectives, but includes both, each act resulting in a specific noema. However, every noesis is totally interrelated with a corresponding noema; neither is possible without the other. Furthermore, "every act of consciousness is so essentially related to its noema that it is only with reference to the latter that the act is qualified and char acterized as that which it is, e.g., that particular percep tion." 25 Consciousness as perceptual act can therefore be defined as a noetico/noematic correlation, an "indissoluble" interrelationship "between consciousness and meaning."26 And since an object (phenomenon) is for the subject the sum 2 3Ibid., p . 46. 24Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, 19 69), Section 17. 25Gurwitsch, p. 48. 2 6Ibid., p. 49. 128 of all possible noemata, it can be described in terms of its relationship to, and/or its difference from, a particular noema. That is, phenomena are for consciousness a noematic system. Or to put it another way, a particular act of con sciousness is the "perceptual apprehension of a noematic system as a whole from the vantage point of one of its members." 2 7 INTUITION: "The principle of all principles is: that very primordial dator Intuition is a source of au thority (Rechtsquelle) for knowledge, that whatever presents itself in 'intuition' in primordial form (as it were in its bodily reality), is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself."28 For Husserl, then, knowledge is revealed directly intuitionally in the immediacy of the encounter of essential consciousness with the essence of phenomena. It is in the immediacy of this intuitional rec ognition that man transcends himself, becoming Pure Ego.29 In order for Husserl to consolidate these fundamental insights into a widely useful philosophical structure, according to Aron Gurwitsch "all that is required is a gen eralized expression of the mentioned reference of objects to acts of consciousness and conscious life as a whole, and the 2 7Ibid., p. 53. 29Ibid., Section 57. 2 8Ideas, p. 83. 129 formulation of that reference in sufficiently radical terms."30 It is this radical expression of the correlation of subjective consciousness to objective reality which pro vides the main theme of Husserl's constitutive transcenden tal phenomenology.31 It is constitutive because each con scious subject creates the existential meaning of his world as he asserts the value (partly essential, partly presuppo sition) accredited to phenomena; it is transcendental because conceptions of meaning exceed the pure data of experience. It has been noted at several points above that man's perception of his world is in part acknowledgment of its independent essentiality, and in part imposition of subjec tive values. It will perhaps be apparent that in the ordi nary course of things these parts are so closely interre lated as to be virtually indistinguishable. However, human activity of every kind is based upon certain assumptions about the nature and character of essential reality, and the validity and viability of knowledge, of meaning, of purpose, indeed of all value systems, is finally dependent upon our ability to discriminate between radical reality and the total perception. It was the definition of this distinction in behalf of establishing a firm foundation for science and philosophy which first motivated Husserl's research; it is 30Gurwitsch, p. 28. 3 Meditations , Section 17. 130 the basis of his phenomenological methodology, a much abbreviated description of which is undertaken in Appendix B following. APPENDIX B APPENDIX B As noted in Appendix A, it is difficult to distinguish between the two aspects which phenomena present to human perception: essentiality, and imposed values (meaning). Nonetheless it is necessary that this be done in order to avoid solipsism. Husserl clearly foresaw that his "proposed critique requires that all scientific and pre-scientific assertions concerning nature, or all statements that imply that things are posited as existent in space, time, causal connection, etc., must be eliminated on principle."1 A major part of Husserl's seminal text, Ideas, is devoted to the definition and description of essence, and to a proposed methodology for enabling subjects to identify and record essence as it appears embedded in experience. Since subject and object are correlates in the act of perception, and since the subject brings to his encounter with the object a residue of knowledge— gained directly from experience or otherwise— the encounter is not a "pure" experiencing; perception is colored by expectation, 1 Marvin Farber, "Husserl and Philosophic Radicalism," in Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (New York, 1967), Pv sir:- - - - - 132 133 influenced by presupposition. That is, the subject antici pates finding the object (of whatever kind) to be a certain kind of thing, to which certain qualities and values inhere. In addition, the occasion, the circumstances, etc., of the encounter may further obscure the naked and unadorned essence of the phenomenal object. "In order to gain access to a pure and primordial experience in which 'things them selves ' appear to us in a genuinely original way,"2 to per ceive the object in its essential or pristine self, i.e., as an essential thing stripped of incremental subjectively imposed meanings or oth^r contingent characteristics, two sorts of perceptual adjustment must be made: one to clarify perceptual "vision," so to speak, the other to reveal the essential reality of the object. These are the "reductions" of Husserlian methodology. In a sense one kind of reduction applies to the subject and one to the object, both having as their function the elimination of non-essential aspects from the perceptual encounter. But it is important to recognise that since only the subjective correlate is active and volitional in percep tion (despite statements that phenomena "present" them selves, "manifest" themselves, etc.), the reductions actually apply to noesis and noema, in a sense to the action and reaction of perception rather than to subject and object 2Joseph J. Kockelmans, "Transcendental Phenomenology and Existentialism," in Phenomenology, pp. 223-224. 134 as such. It must also be kept in mind that as with other dualities in Husserl's phenomenology, the two kinds of reduction are in fact but two perspectives of the same action. Like the noetico/noematic duality which they sup port, they are correlates of the same phenomena, and are only dialectically separable. With the foregoing reservations and limitations in mind, then, the "transcendental reduction"3 is closely analogous to Descartes' methodical doubting,1 * and is aimed at suspending judgment or "bracketing out" temporarily dur ing phenomenological analysis, experientially derived pre suppositions on the part of the subject. Husserl sometimes designates this reduction, "epokh^," meaning that it is "the precondition for reducing the natural world to a world of phenomena."5 Which is to say, this transcendental reduction or epokh£ is a necessary preparation of the subjective con sciousness intended to eliminate presupposition from noesis; 3Husserl calls this reduction "transcendental" or less often, "phenomenological," indiscriminately. We have used the former style here in order to avoid confusion. 1 *Husserl continually asserts his debt, and that of all modern philosophy, to Descartes, although in Cartesian Medi tations , trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, 1969), he devotes a major part of "Meditation 1," to showing a need to abandon many of Descartes' conclusions. However, there can be no doubting the Cartesian roots of much of Husserl's phenome nology. cf. also, Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York, 1962) at many points, particularly in the sec tions dealing with the materialistic viewpoint and the natura1 s tandpoint. 5Richard Schmitt, "Husserl's Transcendental-Phenomeno logical Reduction," in Phenomenology, p. 61. 135 in a word, to "purify" intentionality. The "eidetic" reduction is aimed at eliminating from consideration all contingent characteristics the subject may attribute to the object during the act of perception. It seeks to help establish "the absolutely immutable and unique eidos which governs all individuals"6 of any species of things, i.e., their essence. That is to say, the eidetic reduction allows the subject to confront the "thing-in-it- self" in its naked primordiality, unobscured or distorted by presuppositions. "The [transcendental] reduction is of the greatest importance here since it enables us to reach the data in their purity and in the original form in which they appear in consciousness, to the exclusion of every concep tion that transcends the original data."7 Joseph Kockelmans has written: "The phenomenological and transcendental reductions and the theory concerning constitution form the two pillars upon which the main part of Husserl's phenomenology rests."8 The concept of consti tution has been briefly sketched in Appendix A; here we will merely note that the prohibition of all presupposition from perception is the radical ground upon which the phenomeno logical structure is founded. Husserl's methodology is 6Kockelmans, "What is Phenomenology?" in Phenomenology, p. 31. 7"Transcendental Phenomenology," in Phenomenology, p. 224. 8Ibid., p. 222. 136 designed to make a presuppositionless approach to objective phenomena possible. It is to be arrived at by way of a sys tematic refusal to accept unexamined any a priori assump tions about existence. "In Descartes' hands the method was nugatory. As employed in phenomenology it is an aid in determining the ultimate grounds of knowledge, and also in providing a universal plane of experience and knowledge."9 In temporarily setting aside during the perceptual act all preconceived notions about the specific objective phenome non, the phenomenologist prepares himself to encounter unmediated reality in a condition of receptive oppenness (innocence), at the same time that the essential core of the object stands revealed in unencumbered actuality. Some phenomenologists have discounted certain features of Husserl's methodology, particularly the need for two dis tinctive kinds of reduction.10 And in his own later works this distinction becomes somewhat blurred. However, we sub mit that his techniques as outlined above do point toward a useful methodological framework for literary criticism, one which was already present as an attitude in the work of the English romantics. That is the justification for this rather abstruse detour. 9Farber, p. 51. 1°cf. particularly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenome nology of Perception (New York, 1962), passim. 137 NOTES TO APPENDIX B 1 Marvin Farber, "Husserl and Philosophic Radicalism," in Phenomenology; The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (New York, 1967), p. 50. 2Joseph J. Kockelmans, "Transcendental Phenomenology and Existentialism," in Phenomenology, pp. 223-224. 3Husserl calls this reduction "transcendental" or less often, "phenomenological," indiscriminately. We have used the former style here in order to avoid confusion. ‘ ‘Husserl continually asserts his debt, and that of all modern philosophy, to Descartes, although in Cartesian Medi tations , trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, 1969), he devotes a major part of "Meditation 1," to showing a need to abandon many of Descartes' conclusions. However, there can be no doubting the Cartesian roots of much of Husserl's phenome nology. Cf. also, Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York, 1962) at many points, particularly in the sec tions dealing with the materialistic viewpoint and the natural standpoint. 5Richard Schmitt, "Husserl's Transcendental-Phenome nological Reduction," in Phenomenology, p. 61. 6Kockelmans, "What Is Phenomenology?" in Phenomenol ogy , p. 31. 7"Transcendental Phenomenology," in Phenomenology, p. 224. 6Ibid., p. 222. 9Farber, p. 51. 1°Cf. particularly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenom enology of Perception (New York, 1962), passim.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Jerusalem: The Primitive Christian Vision Of William Blake

PDF

Obstinate In Resurrection: An Interpretation Of Coleridge'S Envisioning Of Reality

PDF

The Prose Style Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

PDF

The Epistemological Poem: Wordsworth'S 'Prelude'

PDF

Form As Theme: A Study Of Andre Gide

PDF

Studies In The Contemporary American And British Science Fiction Novel

PDF

The Contemporary American Family Novel: A Study In Metaphor

PDF

An Anatomy Of Humor

PDF

The Poetic Imagination Of Colette

PDF

The Proteges Of Lancelot: A Study Of Malory'S Characterization Of Lancelot In The 'Morte Darthur'

PDF

The World Picture Of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

PDF

An Analysis Of Selected British Novelists Between 1945 And 1966, And Their Critics

PDF

The Marriage Metaphor And The Romantic Prophecy: A Study Of The Uses Of The Epithalamium In The Poetry Of Blake, Wordsworth, And Coleridge

PDF

'Guingamor,' 'Guigemar,' 'Graelentmor,' 'Lanval,' And 'Desire': A Comparative Study Of Five Breton Lays

PDF

The Giant And The Dragon Of The Folk Epic

PDF

The Critical Reception Of The Dramas Of Albert Camus In The United States, 1945-1964

PDF

Blake, Novalis, and Nerval: the poetics of the apocalypse. A study of Blake's Milton, Novalis' Hymnen an die Nacht and Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Nerval's Aurelia

PDF

Christopher Smart As Lyric Poet

PDF

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Chronology: August 20, 1795 - January 14, 1804

PDF

George Henry Lewes' Evolutionism In The Fiction Of George Eliot

Asset Metadata

Creator Carter, Gerald Charles (author)

Core Title Paradigms Of Phenomenology In Three Romantic Poets

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Schulz, Max F. (committee chair), Eggenschwiler, David L. (committee member), Goodrich, Norma Lorre (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-814049

Unique identifier UC11363511

Identifier 7405851.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-814049 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 7405851

Dmrecord 814049

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Carter, Gerald Charles

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA