The Theological Problem Of Coleridge`s Ethico-epistemology

In my thesis, I suggest that an intimately experienced, philosophical or metaphysical vision - a vision integral to Samuel Taylor Coleridge`s personal make-up - and an urge to express this vision in a diversity of forms, is the prime motivation behind both Coleridge`s early poetic successes and his later theoretical explorations. Thus I hold that poetry and philosophy are deeply intertwined and embedded together in Coleridge`s worldview. As is witnessed through his less formally systematic critical, aesthetic and poetic insights, Coleridge`s philosophising and his aesthetic experiences and activities cannot be rigidly compartmentalised because they are organically, rather than accidentally combined, as equally expressive of the rich unity-in-diversity of the man`s extraordinary personality.

However, I find reason to suggest that, as a whole, Coleridge`s formally systematic thinking, though inspired by high religious, ethical and poetic ideals, faces insurmountable difficulties. This is because of a basic incompatibility between his aesthetic, ethical and religious insights and commitments on the one hand, and the philosophical conceptuality through which he seeks, and, I submit, fails, to do them justice on the other. I regard much more positively what I construe as Coleridge`s biblically-based romanticism, an aesthetic of the conceptually paradoxical intimation of transcendence. In my thesis, this positive reading is formed on the basis of a negative assessment of Coleridge`s formally systematic output. This paper is concerned solely with my critical assessment of Coleridge`s post-Kantian dialectics, as viewed from a basically Kierkegaardian theological standpoint.

Coleridge was drawn to Kantian and post-Kantian thinking because he believed he found there a means to reconcile his poetic faith in the experienced presence of God, as intimated through the natural world, with his Christian faith in a personal freedom that, while ethically fallen, is yet potentially open to redemption through the abiding love of an incarnate God. However, I argue that the a priori necessitarian tendency of Coleridge`s use of post-Kantian idealism leads to a Spinozistic denial of personal freedom. This freedom is the bedrock of Christian faith and ethical commitment, just as it is the source of the freshness, vigour and originality of artistic spontaneity.

Moreover, I suggest that the revelation of salvation in Christ, while undoubtedly a faith fully affirmed by Coleridge, is thoroughly compromised by the overarching teleological trajectory of his idealist metaphysics. I would suggest, therefore, that Coleridge faces a theoretical and ethical impasse. I am led to the conclusion that his intellectual and emotional unrest - possibly exacerbated by his acute personal problems - caused Coleridge to exert himself untiringly (but, I shall argue, to no avail in his systematic output) in the attempt to reconcile his poetic intimations of the `one life, within us and abroad`, as he himself expressed it in verse, with a life lived in faithful commitment to the love of a personal Saviour.

So I regard Coleridge`s as a problematic philosophical quest for reconciliation between two equally compelling personal commitments: to theologically and philosophically pregnant aesthetic insights on the one hand, and, on the other, a living faith in both personal freedom and the need for ethical salvation. I suggest that in the long run, Coleridge was hindered rather than helped by the panentheistic post-Kantian conceptuality through which he sought to reconcile aesthetic experience and ethical faith.

Thomas McFarland, in his Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, bases his argument on the epistemological insight that objects are always found only in epistemic relation to a knowing subject. Subjectivity and objectivity are thus always in polarity, but the `I am`, or subjective position always has actual epistemological priority over the `it is`: the thinker over his thought. To illustrate the particular ethico-epistemological impasse facing an objective metaphysician, McFarland points out that even Spinoza`s metaphysical substance - an objectively conceived pantheistic totality that swallows up all difference within itself, or to which all otherness, including human being, can be reduced through the logical steps of a geometrically modelled procedure - is, existentially, still the freely willed conception of substance of the man, Spinoza, existing and acting intentionally and independently of the closed system of thought that he originated. This means that the thinker whose starting point is metaphysical objectivity will always confront the insurmountable difficulty - in any consistent and rigorous argument, at least - of accounting for his own status as an intentional thinker and agent. There can be no place for the philosopher`s own personal experience of free agency and independent thought within the rigid reticulation of his metaphysics. This view is powerfully articulated by Kierkegaard, in opposition to Hegel`s systematic philosophy, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscri pt of 1846.

Coleridge, as McFarland documents in some detail, was himself well aware of this situation, and consciously strove to `place existence before being` in light of his commitment to personal freedom. However I suggest that Coleridge was unable to find a way consistently to achieve systematic explanatory completeness while preserving ethical freedom, and thereby do full justice to his diverse motivations.

Within the epistemological relationship of thinker and thought, subject and object, philosophers can either choose to start their conceptual development from the objective side, like Spinoza, in which case personal freedom will be lost, or from a conception of subjective freedom, in which case systematic closure will not be possible. The subjective theoretical aporia is illustrated by Descartes` need to invoke a deus ex machina to ensure the independent reality of thought-objects. While selfhood is dissolved in objective constructions, both physiological and metaphysical, solipsism is a looming spectre for the subjectively grounded metaphysician. The solipsistic problem can be avoided only by the acceptance of a dualistic split between subject and object that cannot be conclusively bridged through logical deduction, and which demands an act of faith in an independent world outside of subjectively founded systematic thought.

It is in this latter sense that systematic completeness is deemed impossible for the thinker whose starting point is subjectivity, according to McFarland. But according to Coleridge`s ethicised epistemology, the subject`s self-awareness, and thus his awareness of objective reality, depends on a self-`other-ing` that is the ego`s freely willed self-subordination, in recognition of the authority of conscience over its activities. Coleridge thus wants to commence his thinking on what McFarland dubs the subjective side of the overarching epistemological relation, and through his own ingenious `transcendental deduction`, to make any possible objective consciousness conditional on ethical response. Coleridge would thus appear to be arguing to objectivity, from an initial postulation of human freedom, as actualised through personal relatedness to conscience, regarded as the immanence of a freely creating divine otherness. The conscience is thus held to be the active symbol whereby a morally responsible creature participates in the divine creative intention. It is in and as this participative response to conscience, as the recognition of the authority of the divine intention as intrinsic to, but not straightforwardly identical with one`s sense of self, that objective self-consciousness is enabled. But it is just this dialectical relationship - this differentiated identity linking self and conscience - that is problematic from a theological point of view, and now I will show how.

According to Coleridge`s ethical epistemology, conscience addresses the subject as a `thou`: the subject`s own otherness. In this relationship, as Coleridge points out in his Essay on Faith, sameness, or straightforward identity, is negated in the subject`s recognition of an authoritative otherness immanent within consciousness - the divine immanence of reason in the form of conscience. Coleridge explains his complex ethico-epistemology as follows. He writes that the intimate personal pronoun, `thou`, is conditional to the possibility of objective self-consciousness, because ...the third person could never have been distinguished from the first but by means of the second. There can be no He without a previous Thou. Much less could an I exist for us, except as it exists during the suspension of the will, as in dreams; and the nature of brutes may be best understood by considering them as somnambulists. This is a deep meditation, though capable of the strictest proof, namely that there can be no I without a Thou, and that a Thou is only possible by an equation in which I is taken as equal to Thou, and yet not the same. And this, again, is only possible by putting them in opposition as corresponding opposites, or correlatives. Here Coleridge is pointing to the internal relatedness, the intrinsic mutual inseparability that is simultaneously the condition for reciprocating diversity, within any polarity. Negativity derives its significance in a relationship of contrast with positivity, just as light is inconceivable without darkness, or north without south. These are polarities, and the paradigmatic exemplar of polarity, for Coleridge, is self and other. But that otherness must be in the second-person form of another selfhood, not the third person relation, in which another self is merely the object of a subject`s thought. Only another `I` can make personal demands upon selfhood. It is only with another self that a moral relation directly pertains. Only it is not yet the selfhood of another human being that is referred to, by Coleridge, as decisive for the possibility of self-awareness, as is the case in Martin Buber`s thinking. Rather, it is the far closer relationship of self and conscience (literally, in Latin, con-scientia - interpreted etymologically by Coleridge as the knowledge which I know together with another, a mutual knowing).

Already we can see that Coleridge, like Buber, is deeply concerned about the possibility of true ethical relationship. We have also learned that in Coleridge`s epistemology, the personal otherness to which the ego constitutively relates is none other than the immanence of God as the authority with which conscience is imbued. But we can also see that Coleridge`s utilisation of the logic of polar relationship, or differentiated identity, implies that his epistemological approach to the relationship between self and other is logically calculable.

I submit that any philosophical theology which subsumes God under a conceptual scheme denies ultimacy to God`s freedom to reveal himself in salvific judgement, and thereby effectively places all real faith in the power of human thought. One might suggest that this is more a wish-fulfilment strategy than a genuinely ethical and theological response to revelation.

In order to explain the possibility of self-consciousness, and thus also an objective knowledge of the world, Coleridge, as we have just seen, makes selfhood and the divine authority of conscience polar opposites, or correlates. His account continues by explaining how the underlying identity of the two correlates - `I` and `Thou` - is noted and yet qualified by the ego: In order to this, a something must be affirmed in the one, which is rejected in the other, and this something is the will. I do not will to consider myself as equal to myself, for in the very act of constructing myself I, I take it as the same, and therefore as incapable of comparison, that is, of any application of the will. If then, I minus the will be the thesis; Thou plus will must be the antithesis, but the equation of Thou with I, by means of a free act, negativing the sameness in order to establish the equality, is the true definition of conscience. But as without a Thou there can be no You, so without a You no They, These, or Those; and as all these conjointly form the materials and subjects of consciousness, and the conditions of experience, it is evident that conscience is the root of all consciousness -, a fortiori, the precondition of all experience, - and that the conscience cannot have been in its first revelation deduced from experience. Coleridge thus tries to defend a concept of ethical freedom in response to an authoritative ethical will. But he can only do so, fully systematically, by conceiving the two wills, finite and infinite, in a relation of differentiation or mutual antithesis, as predicated upon underlying identity.

In the Opus Maximum, Coleridge extends this initial postulation of moral freedom. This extension is in order to deepen, while making explicit, the grounding of human ethical freedom in a creative relation to absolute divine `personeity`, or personhood conceived in eminentia: divine personhood `in itself`, as it were. Such divine personeity is deemed the ontologically creative transcendental (as opposed to transcendent) ground of being; as ethical, relationship to the creator thus conceived ought to be freely willed, with the divine freedom to create in love on the one hand, and the human freedom to respond to divine love on the other.

As we have seen, McFarland holds that any such metaphysic as Coleridge`s intends to be, as one which takes its starting point in subjective freedom in relation to a freely creating and loving God, should necessarily be dualistic in form, if argued consistently. Following McFarland`s argument, I suggest that any attempt to elide this dualism of God in relation to a separate creation ad extra, and thus any attempt to move away from a traditional and orthodox scheme of creatio ex nihilo (where `nothing` is conceived in terms of absolute non-being or ouk on), cannot but collapse the real alterity implied and respected in all genuinely ethical personal relationships. We have just seen that Coleridge trespasses on the existential integrity of the `I`/`Thou` relationship by translating both `I` and `Thou` into objective counters within an overarching scheme of logical mediation. I now argue that, while Coleridge is indeed logically consistent in going on to conceive the relation between absolute, creative personeity and creation in terms of conceptual mediation, he is, in effect, only thereby consistent with McFarland`s objective metaphysical starting point, which, as seen, denies the possibility of a genuinely ethical account. Creation ex nihilo thus becomes the logical mediation whereby a concept of reality - which is conceived as common to both creator and creation - is analysed through a polar account of actuality and potentiality, or relative non-being.

I offer the following quotation from his Opus Maximum as evidence that Coleridge utilises a concept of dialectical or merely relative non-being, (me on). Here non-being is not absolute, but is conceived as potentiality, or the reciprocal pole or antithesis of actuality, as mutually related through an underlying and all-encompassing concept of reality. Coleridge castigates the false division which has so long prevailed in the methods of philosophy under the name of Dichotomy, in which the position always begins with two, a thing and its opposite. Thus we should have the real, and as its opposite and co-ordinate the un-real or non-entity, that is, an opposition in which there can be no opposite. If, on the other hand, we took the real as the pregnant uninvolved point and the identity of both opposites, and these opposites again as the two poles of the line into which the point produces itself, or into which it unfolded in order to manifest its being, we should see clearly that both alike are forms of that point, and that, therefore, under the idea reality we have to find two opposites, both of which are reality, though each a form opposite to the other. These forms, these opposite poles of reality, are the actual and the potential... It is clear from this quotation that Coleridge works from a logically nuanced and objective concept of reality, which is capable of dialectical development through the related antitheses of polar logic.

Coleridge would doubtless object that his `reality` is not a concept, but a Platonic form or idea of reason. But while, as I argue elsewhere, Coleridge`s aesthetic writings would tend to substantiate his claim for an experiential foundation of his concept of the ideal, it is also clear that Coleridge necessarily has no choice but to utilise ordinary, determinate concepts of the understanding in his supposedly higher or productive logic of dialectical reason. And this is simply because there just is no other way to express oneself linguistically - except, of course, through imaginative conceptual indeterminacy, or as Kierkegaard practices it, communicative indirection. Coleridge, however, as well as being a poet and aesthetician has a powerful drive towards systematic metaphysics; and if he is to be a systematic metaphysician, then he must use logic; and logic, whether dichotomous or dialectical, can only forge determinate chains of conceptual argument, which render impossible any genuine account of ethical freedom.

Coleridge is, of course, thoroughly aware of this, writing: The Practical Reason alone is Reason in the full and substantive sense. It is reason in its own sphere of perfect freedom, as the source of IDEAS; which Ideas, in their conversion to the responsible Will, become Ultimate Ends. On the other hand, Theoretic Reason, as the ground of the Universal or Absolute in all logical conclusion is rather the Light of Reason in the Understanding, and known to be such by its contrast with the contingency and particularity which characterise all the proper and indigenous growths of the Understanding. The logical method of determining the ideal - the `ideal` being a term which is used in an improper sense in such a theoretical context, according to Coleridge`s own testimony just cited - is utilised throughout Coleridge`s more systematic writings, but contrasts strongly with his approach to the ideal in relation to aesthetics, as I argue in my thesis. There I suggest that, unlike what Kierkegaard would have castigated as the illusory movement of Coleridge`s theoretical dialectic, the records of Coleridge`s truly dynamic aesthetic approach bear witness to a real and progressive, yet literally incalculable development, or qualitative transformation of ethico-religious insight, through the felt duration