Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy

Literature and Philosophy The relationship between literature and philosophy has formed an established part of the study of romantic aesthetics since the work of René Wellek, Arthur O. Lovejoy and M. H. Abrams in the early twentieth century.1 Subsequent waves of theory and historicism have confirmed the importance of the topic to our understanding of the culture and politics of romanticism. And yet, the issue can be a beguiling one for modern scholarship, not least because our very notions of ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’ are, to a great extent, forged in the romantic era itself. It is only during this period that the modern notion of ‘Literature,’ with its aura of autonomy and profundity, comes to be distinguished from the more instrumental arts of rhetoric and belles lettres. In a related development, ‘philosophy’ begins to be divorced from ‘natural philosophy,’ which in turn is reincarnated in the early nineteenth century as ‘science’. Prior to these developments, it had been possible to conceive of progressive knowledge as a kind of unified commonwealth, evidenced by the founding of institutions such as the Lunar Society and the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. By the end of the century, however, the image of a field of human knowledge bound together by a commanding intellect, such as Newton’s genius or Shaftesbury’s ‘Universal Mind,’ came under pressure from the increasing diversity of scientific discoveries and a corresponding drive to divide philosophical labour.2 At the same time, 2 thinkers such as Dugald Stewart cast doubt on the Aristotelian idea that poetry’s cognitive status rested upon its status as a medium that grants access to general truths about human nature. For Stewart, poetic creativity is bought at the price of epistemological substance: while it is the privilege of the poet rather than the scientist ‘to produce something which had no existence before,’ the creations of the poetic imagination, he maintains, are ‘not for the purpose of information, but to convey pleasure to the mind [...].’3 This threat of epistemological disenfranchisement spurs romantic writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth to re-establish poetry’s cognitive pedigree, which in turn reignites an ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy. From its inception, this quarrel was politically inflected. Romanticperiod writers engage with philosophical ideas in the context of an antipathy in Britain towards philosophers that grows steadily from the mid-1790s onwards. Such misgivings were not entirely new: even during the Enlightenment, philosophy and philosophers had borne the brunt of the scepticism of David Hume in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), the satirical volleys of Voltaire in Candide (1759) and the Philosophical Dictionary (1764), Thomas Reid’s advocacy of common sense in An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), and more recently, the linguistic materialism of John Horne Tooke’s Diversions of Purley (1786-1805). The counterrevolutionary rhetoric of Edmund Burke, 3 however, created a politically urgent basis for British suspicions regarding philosophy. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke attacks not only the theory behind the French Revolution as a ‘barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings,’ but also the very assumption that philosophical systems should be a basis for polity, adding, with regard to the latter, that ‘in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false.’4 He continues: What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics. The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught à priori.5 In opposition to what he perceives to be the cold abstractions of ‘rights of man’ philosophers such as William Paley and Thomas Paine, Burke promotes other spheres of value, which, he believes, are more solidly grounded in the traditions, emotional attachments, and even the prejudices of a people. Accordingly, Burke’s ideal constitution is affectionate, filial and partial, rather than enthusiastic, contractual and rational. In this respect, literature boasts an advantage over philosophy, insofar as its privileged links 4 with human affections mean that it is a ‘a better school of moral sentiments [...].’ Unlike philosophers, he insists, poets ‘who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the heart,’ could never find the spectacle of the French Revolution a source of ‘exultation.’6 By appealing to the ‘moral constitution of the heart,’ Burke attempts to wrest the language of poetic feeling and sensibility from the hands of the followers of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and enlist it in his defence of fidelity against abstraction. As passages such as these suggest, Burke’s style was as instrumental as his arguments in politicising the discourse of philosophy during the romantic period. The Reflections’ self-consciously rococo rhetoric of chivalric honour forged a link between the high grounds of ‘elevated’ or poetic speech and anti-Jacobin politics, leaving the lowlands of ordinary language or ‘plain speaking’ to republican philosophers like Paine and William Cobbett. This realignment would later be adopted by a political opponent, the essayist and philosopher William Hazlitt, who contrasted the ‘aristocratic’ imagination, an ‘exaggerating and exclusive faculty,’ with the ‘republican’ and ‘distributive’ understanding. ‘The principle of poetry,’ Hazlitt concluded, ‘is a very anti-levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast [...].’ Whereas ‘Poetry is right-royal,’ philosophy, Hazlitt implies, is radical-republican.7 Before Hazlitt appropriated Burke’s dichotomy between Jacobin philosophical prose and anti-Jacobin poetic prejudice, however, other 5 writers had attempted to circumvent it. Most notably, the ‘Preface’ to the 1800 edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads attempts to radicalise Burke’s rhetoric of power by bridging the gap between partial and ‘exclusive’ homely feeling on one side and, on the other, republican common sense and plain speaking. By ‘fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation,’ Wordsworth and Coleridge conduct an experiment that is at once aesthetic, philosophical and political.8 The attempt to marry the folk-authenticity of the ballad with the sincerity and spontaneity of the lyric is underpinned by the principle that poetry (rooted in ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’) is opposed not to prose, but to ‘Matter of Fact, or Science.’9 For Wordsworth, it follows from this that ‘a language arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings is a more permanent and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets [...].’10 By associating poetic affect with plebeian emotions, Wordsworth attempts to outmanoeuvre Burke’s division between a powerful but partial poetic imagination and an egalitarian but abstract philosophical understanding. In this way, Lyrical Ballads redefines the epistemology and the politics of literary expression. True poetry for Wordsworth and Coleridge is ‘philosophical’ precisely because it is not based in abstract rationality. Nonetheless, due partly to Burke’s efforts and partly to subsequent wars with France, ‘philosophy,’ natural and metaphysical, becomes a 6 disreputable business in the eyes of a class of British readers for whom the abstract universalism adumbrated by Rousseau and Godwin is increasingly associated with the unflinching application of revolutionary principle by Robespierre and the Committee for Public Safety. Following the Lyrical Ballads’ attempt to explore the philosophical possibilities of poetry through quotidian forms of expression, Wordsworth and Coleridge turn their attention towards other, less politically contentious reserves of authenticity. Like many writers of the period who were repelled by Burke’s politics but drawn to his ideas regarding the links between poetry, power, and the imagination, they were particularly attracted to the notion of a mind ‘purified by terror.’11 In Reflections, Burke had forged a connection between patriarchal norms and the aesthetics of the sublime, defending the irrational, affective bonds that bind families and societies as well as traditions inherited from ‘canonized forefathers,’ through which freedom ‘is tempered with an awful gravity’ and ‘carries an imposing and majestic aspect.’12 Such arguments echo aspects of Burke’s earlier work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in which he argued that ‘authentic histories’ documenting the ruin of empires and state catastrophes could be sources of sublime emotion. Indeed, ‘[o]ur delight in cases of this kind, is very greatly heightened, if the sufferer be some excellent person who sinks under an unworthy fortune [...] for terror is a 7 passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close, and pity is a passion accompanied with pleasure, because it arises from love and social affection.’13 For the later Burke, it follows that the terrifying spectacle of the French Revolution can become, in an Aristotelian sense, a source of cathartic edification: [W]e are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments [...]; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; because [...] we behold such disasters in the moral, as we should behold a miracle in the physical order of things. We are alarmed into reflexion; our minds [...] are purified by terror and pity; our weak unthinking pride is humbled under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom.14 For others, however, the figure of the sublime offered the potential for revolutionising both poetry and philosophy based on the elevation of dynamic energy over rational persuasion, of ‘mysterious wisdom’ over scientific knowledge. Accordingly, just as Burke adapted the affective vocabulary of the radicals for conservative ends, so his own distinction between the philosophical knowledge of prosaic reason and the ‘mysterious wisdom’ of the poetic imagination was appropriated by a generation of writers sympathetic to revolution but disenchanted with rationalism. 8 Nowhere is this enthusiasm expressed more forcibly than in Blake’s critique of pure reason, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), which depicts humanity’s fallen intellect, ‘clos’d by [...] senses five’ (plates 6-7), as incarcerated by empirical rationality. Blake’s belief in the primacy of energy and his conviction that ‘[w]ithout Contraries is no progression’ (plate 3) challenges the materialist and empiricist philosophies of the Enlightenment by depicting humanity as supernatural, dynamic and imaginative, rather than as natural, static and intellectual. Reason itself (and by extension, philosophy), Blake suggests, is merely ‘the bound or outward circumference of Energy’ (plate 4). Accordingly, the narrator of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell evinces a suspicion of rationalists and philosophers who speak ‘with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning,’ concluding in his dialogue with the Angel that ‘it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics’ (plates 17-20). Blake associates the ‘bound’ of reason with more concrete forms of intellectual, political and sexual repression: thus, in The First Book of Urizen (1794), the eponymous ‘abstracted / Brooding’ (6-7) figure who most obviously encapsulates these themes, punningly links rationality (‘your reason’) with limitation (‘horizon’). The sorry consequences of Urizen’s fall into abstraction and solipsism in The Book of Urizen reveal Blake’s concern that philosophy’s edifice of systematic knowledge is merely a symptom of 9 modern man’s stagnation and alienation. For Blake, seeing the world as it really is requires an unbinding of imaginative energy that counters Urizenic limit-horizons by pushing thought towards the sublime—in other words (as the etymology of term implies), up to (sub) and beyond the limit (līmen) of what is conceivable according to empirical philosophy. It is this revolutionary act that Blake’s illuminated manuscripts instigate: like the ‘corroding fires’ (plates 6-7) of the Black Devil in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake’s plates of acid-rendered relief etchings attempt to cleanse the ‘doors of perception' (plate 14) by burning away the bounds of sense and empirical rationality. Apocalyptic ideas such as these suggest the potential of human vision to cross the boundary between the finite and the infinite, with the result that revelatory moments in romantic literature are frequently figured as forms of transgression, characterised by an ineffable awareness of a power in humanity that surpasses nature. 'Vision' in Blake's universe entails a subliming of experience that exceeds intellectualisation, and which can often only be expressed indirectly through an image of terror, such as the Tyger. Similarly, in the long poem to Coleridge that would posthumously become The Prelude, Wordsworth deploys tropes of terror as a way of intimating a level of philosophical wisdom that transcends the merely intellectual. In one celebrated passage in Book V, the poet recounts an 10 epiphanic episode from his childhood when he witnessed the body of a drowned man being recovered from Esthwaite Lake: At length, the dead Man, 'mid that beauteous scene Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright Rose with his ghastly face, a spectre shape— Of terror even. And yet no vulgar fear, Young as I was, a child not nine years old, Possessed me; for my inner eye had seen Such sights before among the shining streams Of fairyland, the forests of romance— (1805, V.470-77) By adding a caveat infused with the more tranquil and conventional language of '[o]f fairyland, the forests of romance,' Wordsworth attempts to contain the more radical aspects of his poetic enthusiasm. And yet, like Blake's dialectical imagination, Wordsworth’s dynamic consciousness aspires to an apocalyptic insight that drives philosophical thought beyond the realm of abstraction. In ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,’ natural perception takes second place to the ‘sublime’ gifts of nature, chief among which is ‘that blessed mood, / In which the burthen of the mystery [...] Is lightened’ so that we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: 11 While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. (46-50) For Blake and Wordsworth, seeing ‘into the life of things’ has less to do with knowledge as conceived by Enlightenment discourse, and more to do with ‘power.’ Indeed, in the hands of some writers, romantic poetry challenges one of the basic paradigms of Western philosophy since Descartes: the construction of the self upon the foundation of a knowing consciousness. Accordingly, poetry's challenge to philosophy is not for the latter to demonstrate the validity of its truth-claims, but for philosophy to prove itself equal to the task of promoting a flourishing human condition capable of experiencing 'spots of time' (Prelude 1805 XI.257) that escape rationalisation. And yet, while the apocalyptic crux of romantic vision, the notion of an experience that crosses the threshold of the infinite, defied the largely empirical grid of understanding inherited by Blake and Wordsworth, the epistemological issue at the heart of this ideal had been a heated topic of philosophical debate in Germany for decades. For Kant and his successors, the possibility of the visionary imagination was bound up with the specific problem of intellectual intuition. This brings us to Coleridge, who, more than any other British writer of this period sees the relationship between literature and philosophy as 12 central to the reorientation of aesthetics away from taste and receptivity and towards genius and productivity. As he declares in Biographia Literaria (1817), 'in energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power; and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production.'15 The notion of truth domesticated into power implied a new model of poetry (indeed, of art in general) based upon ideas of aesthetic autonomy and of the irreducibility of ‘poetic truth.' Although this model had already been suggested by Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge came to suspect that poetry’s independence from science could not be justified within the language of British empiricism, indeed, that the inevitable tendency of the mechanical and empirical traditions of Newton and Locke was to reduce and marginalise the cultural significance of art, poetry and the creative imagination. Moreover, in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Terror, many of whose adherents claimed to base their thinking upon the ideas of John Locke, Coleridge became concerned that the materialist philosophies of his youth presupposed no Christian theology and were compatible with atheism. Despite championing the materialist associationism of David Hartley and the vitalist theories of Humphry Davy in the 1790s as models of human development and social progress, he became convinced that a more fundamental reorientation in the philosophical culture in Britain was required. This conviction hardened 13 when, following a walking tour of Germany taken with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, he encountered a new current of thought influenced by the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The impact that this new philosophy would have on his thinking is evident in a letter he wrote to his friend and patron Thomas Poole soon after returning from mainland Europe: The interval since my last Letter has been filled up by me in the most intense Study. If I do not greatly delude myself, I have not only completely extricated the notions of Time, and Space; but have overthrown the doctrine of Association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern Infidels [...].16 Coleridge's boasts scarcely suggest the extent of his debts to his German sources. Nor was he the only British writer in this period to encounter the works of Kant and his followers: Henry Crabb Robinson had studied them while living in Germany; Hazlitt often cited Kant in support of his claims that the mind alone is formative, while Thomas De Quincey deployed German metaphysics as part of the philosophical scenery for his Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). In addition, many readers in Britain would have been acquainted with Kant through Madame De Staël's De l'Allemagne (1813). Nonetheless, Coleridge is the first British thinker to engage in a rigorous and searching way with the philosophical and cultural implications of German idealism. Consequently, the letter to Poole is as good a marker as any for the moment when the seeds of the new idealism 14 are first firmly planted in an Anglophone culture. Like Burke, Coleridge reviled the perceived atheism of the Jacobins, but while this revulsion prompted the former to attack metaphysics as such, it emboldened Coleridge to reconstruct philosophy from its foundations. This reconstruction involved overturning the three main ‘isms’ that formed the backbone of the ‘irreligious metaphysics’ of modern thought: materialism (the ontological theory, defended by Hartley and Priestley, that all that exists is matter or energy); empiricism (the epistemological theory, defended by Locke, Hume and Berkeley, that all knowledge is based upon experience); and associationism (the psychological theory, defended by Hartley and Hume, that human consciousness is determined by the connexion of ideas according to contingent principles of association). As Coleridge discovered, basing a critique of associationism upon the principles of transcendental idealism meant rethinking the relationship between literature and philosophy. That this was the case was largely due to the peculiar role that aesthetics came to play within the philosophy of Kant and German idealism. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant departs from empiricism in two fundamental ways: first, by thinking about knowledge transcendentally rather than causally; secondly, by treating mediation as a precondition, rather than as an obstacle to valid experience. In the first of these innovations, Kant discards the inductive method of Locke and Hume, 15 which attempted to establish Descartes' sapient being or cogito in the data of sense perception. If Hume had shown the impotence of reason in living a human life, Kant concluded, then First philosophy must take the form of a critique of reason's limits. Rather than asking, what causes my experience, transcendental method begins with the question: what are the conditions of the possibility of experience? Unlike the empiricist, Kant argues, the transcendental philosopher will find that there are necessary conditions to experience which can only be known a priori. In turn, Coleridge saw in Kant's inauguration of a transcendental (rather than dogmatic) a priori the reestablishment of a link between the human mind and a universal order that transcended the purely inductive, naturalistic and 'irreligious metaphysics' of a generation of thinkers inspired by Locke, Hume and Hartley. Transcendental method becomes crucial to Coleridge’s attempts to move beyond the ‘paralogisms’ of empiricism, materialism and associationism, as when, in Biographia Literaria, he asks: ‘How can we make bricks without straw? Or build without cement? We learn all things indeed by occasion of experience; but the very facts so learnt force us inward on the antecedents, that must be pre supposed in order to render experience itself possible.’17 Kant’s own pursuit of transcendental method triggers his second departure from empiricism, namely, idealism. By thinking about knowledge in terms of the conditions of experience, Kant argues, we come to see that the world as we experience is fundamentally ordered by mental intuitions 16 and concepts. It is a transcendental condition of experience, and consequently of knowledge, that the mind partly creates the world that it experiences. As Kant puts it, ‘we ourselves bring into the appearances that order and regularity in them that we call nature [...].’18 One important corollary of Kant’s position is the impossibility of knowing the world outside the mediation of these ideal forms of experience. Since ‘[s]ensibility and its field, namely that of appearances [...] do not pertain to things in themselves, but only to the way in which [...] things appear to us,’ reality as it is in itself and to itself, unmediated by the forms of intuition and understanding, is inaccessible.19 For Kant, the loss of the Ding an sich is the price of defeating a scepticism engendered by empiricism. This in turn means understanding that ideas like ‘infinity’, ‘God’, even the ‘self’ have no constitutive role to play within human knowledge. Such things, while they may be conceivable, lay outside our possible experience; they are what Kant terms ‘noumenal’, as distinct from the ‘phenomenal’ world of our perceptual experience. Although we may (indeed, in certain cases, must) think such ideas, we cannot have knowledge of their objects. To know the self, for instance, in an unmediated way would involve a very exotic kind of non-spatial, non-temporal intuition, or what Kant calls ‘intellectual intuition’, which ‘lies absolutely outside our faculty of cognition [...].’20 Kant’s conservatism regarding intellectual intuition foregrounds the mixed legacy of the critical philosophy for Coleridge, as the latter strove to 17 develop a philosophical vocabulary that might vindicate the visionary imagination of Wordsworth. On one hand, Kant’s depiction of the human mind as both receptive (empirical) and spontaneous (transcendental) in its operations provides Coleridge with grounds for defending the authenticity of poetic creativity against critics who shared Stewart’s conviction that such mental creations were, epistemologically speaking, foundationless. Furthermore, Kant’s articulation of aesthetic judgement as reflective (spontaneous) and therefore disinterested (i.e. directly adding neither to the knowledge nor to the pleasure of the subject) provided Coleridge with a justification of aesthetic experience as autonomous. On the other hand, Kant’s methods were for Coleridge merely an initial step towards a more fundamental rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and existence. As he declares in Biographia Literaria, ‘Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being. This again is no way conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are– ab initio, identical and co inherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally each other's Substrate.’21 In passages such as these, Coleridge draws heavily upon thinkers such as F.W. von Schelling and J.G. Fichte, both of whom attempt to bridge the Kantian chasm between the phenomenal and the noumenal, between subjective and objective reality. Accordingly, for Fichte and Schelling, philosophy’s most fundamental questions relate not so much to the possibility of experience as 18 they do to the possibility of intellectual intuition. The two thinkers address this issue by expanding different components of Kant’s architectonic. Fichte sets out from Kant’s argument that in behaving morally we think practically rather than cognitively, acting in accordance with a ideal moral law of which we can have no knowledge, but which, nonetheless, regulates our dealings with other persons. Fichte takes this argument a step further by making selfhood itself dependent upon the activity of practical reason, arguing that we are never more ourselves than when we are exerting our wills in self-reflexion. As he puts it in his ‘Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre’, the only way that ‘belief in the reality of this intellectual intuition [...] can be accomplished is by exhibiting the ethical law within us [...]. It is in this way that the I becomes characterized as something absolutely active.’22 Fichte’s emphasis on the constitutive nature of will chimed with Coleridge’s Christian voluntarism, and reinforced the latter’s conviction that ‘as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of being altogether, its primary ground can be neither merely speculative or merely practical, but both in one.’23 However, Fichte’s attempt to build a system of truth from within consciousness proved to be too ego-centred for Coleridge. More attractive, at least during the period when he was writing Biographia Literaria, was the philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling. Where Fichte builds upon Kant’s critique 19 of practical reason, Schelling’s departure point is Kant’s account of aesthetic freedom and the productivity of artistic genius. The chief merit of artistic genius for Kant is that, by exceeding the cognitive measures of understanding, it can ‘animate the mind by opening up for it the prospect of an immeasurable field of related representations.’24 Schelling develops Kant’s account of genius into a system of reality as self-reflective productivity, or consciousness. In his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), he agrees with Kant that the act of intuiting oneself intellectually (i.e., to be at once subject and object for oneself) is impossible. However, he argues, it remains possible for the self to intuit itself aesthetically, for ‘the aesthetic intuition simply is the intellectual intuition become objective.’25 In this way, subject and object can be united through artistic activity, and ‘[t]hat which the philosopher allows to be divided [...] comes, through the miracle of art, to be radiated back from the products thereof.’26 Schelling’s conclusion that ‘art is at once the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy,’ not only underpins Coleridge’s declaration that the poet ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity,’ it also justifies Biographia’s own blending of philosophical reflection and literary productivity.27 Consequently, it is only in the context of Biographia’s total performance that Coleridge’s defence of Wordsworth as a ‘philosophical poet’ makes sense: namely, that the philosophical basis of Wordsworth’s poetry lies in the way in which his genius aesthetically completes the task of philosophy. 20 However, even Kant’s relatively conservative and quietist concerns with transcendental harmonies were viewed with mistrust in some quarters in Britain. Coleridge’s attempts in Biographia Literaria and elsewhere to leaven his German idealist sources with Neoplatonic and other, more arcane authorities did little to alleviate British readers’ suspicions of modern philosophers. Moreover, such misgivings were not confined to the antiJacobin tendency, as is illustrated by Byron’s mocking depiction of Coleridge in the ‘Dedication’ to Don Juan (1819) as a ‘hawk encumbered with his hood / Explaining metaphysics to the nation’ (14-15). The feeling among a younger generation of writers that transcendentalism was reactionary obscurantism is further evident in Thomas Love Peacock’s thinly disguised parody of Coleridge as ‘Mr. Flosky’ in the satirical novel Nightmare Abbey (1818) Recanting his youthful support for the French Revolution, Flosky ‘plunged into the central opacity of Kantian metaphysics, and lay perdu several years in transcendental darkness, till the common daylight of common sense became intolerable to his eyes.’28 Peacock’s antithesis of ‘transcendental darkness’ and ‘the common daylight of common sense’ highlights the fact that, despite Coleridge’s exertions, German idealism never quite grips the romantic imagination in Britain. In alluding to the dominant philosophical trend at this time (the ‘common sense’ theory of Thomas Reid, James Beattie and Dugald Stewart), it also reminds us of the considerable influence exerted by the 21 Scottish Enlightenment over British romantic culture. The mock-debate that takes place between Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ (1821) and Peacock’s ‘Four Ages of Poetry’ (1820), for example, extends an earlier dispute between the scepticism of Hume and the historiography of William Robertson. Thus, Shelley’s declaration that only poetry can free us from the illusions of objectivity by enabling us ‘to imagine that which we know,’ offers a Humean-sceptical rebuttal of Peacock’s Scottish-Enlightenment narrative of the historical decline of imaginative poetry and the rise of empirical knowledge.29 Indeed, although they arrive at very different conclusions, both texts incorporate elements of what Dugald Stewart, in his ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.’, termed ‘Theoretical or Conjectural History,’ a method that combined narratives of social progress with imagined models of past, present and future communities.30 Pioneered by Robertson, Rousseau and Lord Kames as a way of bridging narratives of historical progress with (often sketchy) historical detail, ‘theoretical history’ becomes a literary genre in its own right in John Galt’s novels, particularly Annals of the Parish (1821) and The Provost (1822), each of which is intended to represent a ‘kind of treatise on the history of society.’31 In Galt’s work as well as in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, one can see the emergence of a distinctly British-romantic form of historical epistemology, whereby the historical narrative displays a reflexive awareness of its own role in structuring past events. 22 Once the boundaries between the cultures of romanticism and the Scottish Enlightenment are seen to blur in these ways, the role played by ‘common sense’ within romantic writing appears more complicated. On one hand, the term was firmly linked to the earnest philosophising of the Scots, prompting Charles Lamb to celebrate, in ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ (1821), an ‘essentially anti-Caledonian’ order of ‘imperfect intellects,’ the owners of which ‘have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive.’32 In one respect, this sentiment is unsurprising: commonsensism’s roots in an Enlightenment discourse of sociability and intersubjectivity were unlikely to retain their appeal for early nineteenth-century writers who increasingly venerated imagination, consciousness and individuality. Thus, for Coleridge, common sense was merely a form of linguistic residue that passed for folk wisdom, as ‘[w]hat was born and christened in the schools passes by degrees into the world at large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-table.’33 On the other hand, Reid’s original defence of common sense appears more ‘romantic’ when considered as part of a broader, counterphilosophical impulse running through the long eighteenth century. The Cartesian demand for a ‘first’ philosophy disappears, Reid argues, when we exchange the picture of a mind that uses ideas to represent reality for one in which sensation produces belief through ‘simple and original, and therefore inexplicable acts of the mind.’34 This fundamentally non-intellectual, instinctive image of the mind at work is shared by Hazlitt’s otherwise very 23 different conception of ‘common sense’ in ‘Paragraphs on Prejudice’ as synonymous with ‘natural feeling, which [...] lies between the two extremes of absolute proof and the grossest ignorance.’35 Hazlitt’s use of common sense to describe the active but inchoate realm of ‘urgent, but undefined impressions of things upon us,’ indicates how vital the vocabulary of empiricism remained to writers during this period, particularly those who found that the new aura of autonomy surrounding literary and other art works offered an form of engagement with the world which unburdened the modern self of knowingness. In some writers, such concerns produce an indifference to knowledge that rejects both empirical rationalism and the metaphysics of imagination. This perspective is most memorably expressed by Keats’s defence of ‘Negative Capability’ as the poetic capacity for existing ‘in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason [...].’36 In its elevation of emotional paradox, indeterminacy and the unparaphrasable quickness of experience over cognition, Keats’s ‘negative capability,’ like Lamb’s ‘imperfect’ sympathy, suggests a deeper suspicion of reflective thought, whether abstract, empirical or transcendental. By contrast, transcendentalist aesthetics transforms the relationship between literature and philosophy by theoretical means. For idealists it seemed that, if literature (and by extension, art in general) could noncognitively approach a ‘Truth’ that philosophy could not grasp, it 24 followed that what Schelling called the ‘miracle of art’ signalled the end of literature’s subservience to philosophy. Indeed, it could be argued that one corollary of the new aesthetics is the inauguration of ‘Literature’ itself, distinguished from its lower-case forebear by virtue of its reflexive power to embody intellectual intuition and unify subject and object. Rather than seeing poetry as the dress of thought, the ornamentation of just representations of philosophical truths, post-Kantian aesthetics postulates a ‘Literary Absolute,’ through which art and literature alone can produce representations that accommodate the philosophical impossibility of mirroring an Absolute Truth that is itself constituted by those representations.37 In other words, through romanticism, ‘Literature’ becomes not just a genre in itself, but also (since it escapes all attempts at formal classification and determination) the genre of romantic writing. This inauguration and elevation of ‘Literature’ instigates a paradigm-shift, whereby the neoclassical model of literature as exemplum whose meaning might be paraphrased into the language of reason and general truth is supplanted by one of literature as autotelism, in which the relationship between a work’s form and content are dictated by ideas of essence and growth rather than by convention. Aspiring to the condition of a symbol that, in the words of Coleridge’s The Statesman’s Manual (1816), ‘partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible,’ romantic poems such as his ‘Kubla Khan’ self-consciously embody the relationship between the 25 creative imagination and an unattainable Absolute in the indeterminate form of the fragment.38 Accordingly, behind Coleridge’s and (to a lesser extent) Wordsworth’s literary ambitions to produce a 'genuine philosophical poem’ at the turn of the century is less a desire to emulate the early eighteenthcentury theodicies of Alexander Pope, Mark Akenside and James Thomson by testing ‘literary’ thoughts and emotions against general philosophical truths, and more a determination to write poetry that achieves the condition of being simultaneously philosophy as literature and literature as philosophy. There remains, however, an ambivalence within this Janus-faced ideal. On one hand, transcendental aesthetics can be seen as the culmination of Enlightenment system-building, insofar as they install an organic universalism that attempts to accommodate the subtle interpenetration of part and whole, particle and absolute, that Enlightenment thinkers like Hume had found so troublesome. Much of the work of Schelling and Coleridge for example, reflects their concern with establishing a nonreductive but philosophical principle of unity. This preoccupation informs Coleridge’s development of a theory of organic literary form and his insistence that ‘all Method supposes a principle of unity with progression,’ that ‘can never in the sciences of experiment or in those of observation be adequately supplied by a theory built on generalization.’39 For Friedrich Schlegel, on the other hand, philosophy’s representational 26 limitations themselves become the precondition and organising principle of a kind of poetry that transcends philosophy. Thus, while Schlegel’s ‘romantic’ poetry embodies the reflexivity of the dialectic of consciousness described by Fichte and Schelling, it remains ironic rather than apodictic in outlook. As Schlegel puts it in his ‘Critical Fragments’ (1797), irony contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. It is the freest of all licences, for by its means one transcends oneself; and yet it is also the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary.40 Human life is philosophically ironic for Schlegel because the self is perpetually caught between ‘the impossibility and necessity’ of selfidentification, of complete communication with itself. Romantic or ‘transcendental’ poetry, he argues, expresses this condition more effectively than philosophy because of its resistance to closure and determination and its self-conscious engagement with the necessity and impossibility of arriving at Absolute Truth. Accordingly, in his ‘Athenäum Fragments’ (1798), Schlegel describes romantic poetry (and by extension, poetry in general) not as a product, but as a process that ‘is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterize its ideal. [...] The romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind, that is, as it 27 were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic.’41 Schlegel’s manifesto joins Shelley’s claim that poets are the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the World’ in setting a high-water mark for the romantic faith in the power of literature to restore a unity and purpose to consciousness that had been lost by Enlightenment philosophy.42 In Germany, philosophy would return in the shape of Hegel’s historical dialectic, subsuming romantic aesthetics within ‘the prose of life,’ while in Britain the explosion of print culture and the rise of the realist novel undermined Coleridge’s idea of the literary work as autotelism. As romantic tropes and ideas became increasingly anthologised and commoditised, the challenge facing later nineteenth-century writers attracted to such notions would be to defend Literature’s newly-won autonomy in the absence of transcendental assurances. Tim Milnes, University of Edinburgh 28 Further Reading Abrams, M.H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954. Cavell, Stanley. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Eldridge, Richard. The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Engell, James. The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Fischer, Michael. ‘Accepting the Romantics as Philosophers.’ Philosophy and Literature 12 (1988), 179-89. Hamilton, Paul. Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Kompridis, Nikolas, ed. Philosophical Romanticism. Nw York: Routledge, 2006. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Literary Absolute. Trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. New York: State University of New York Press, 1988. 29 McFarland, Thomas. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Milnes, Tim. Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Perkins, Mary Anne. Coleridge's Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Rajan, Tilottama and Plotnitsky, Arkady, eds. Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture. New York: State University of New York Press, 2004. Simpson, David. Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Swift, Simon. Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy: Expressive Rationality in Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft and Contemporary Theory. London: Continuum, 2006. 30 Notes 1 See René Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England 1793-1838 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1931); Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘Coleridge and Kant's Two Worlds,’ Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: George Braziller, 1955), 254-76; M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). 2 Anthony Ashley Cooper [Third Earl of Shaftesbury], Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. 2 (1737, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 164. 3 Dugald Stewart, The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. William Hamilton, vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1854), 282, 448. 4 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), 115, 91. 5 Burke, Reflections, 89-90. 6 Burke, Reflections, 120. 7 William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, vol. 4 (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1930-34), 214. 8 William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads,’ The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 118. 31 9 Wordsworth, Prose Works, 148, 135. 10 Wordsworth, Prose Works, 124. 11 Burke, Reflections, 120. 12 Burke, Reflections, 49. 13 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London, 1759), 73. 14 Burke, Reflections, 119-20. 15 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, eds. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, vol. 1 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 85. 16 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘To Thomas Poole,’ 16 March 1801, letter 387 of Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-71), 706. 17 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 142. 18 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, eds. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 241. 19 Kant, CPR, 348. 20 Kant, CPR, 361. 21 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 142-43. 22 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings (1797-1800), ed. Daniel Breazeale (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994), 49. 32 23 Coleridge, Biographia, vol. 1, 252. 24 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, eds. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 193. 25 F.W.J. von Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1978), 228. 26 Schelling, System, 230. 27 Coleridge, Biographia, vol. 2, 15-16. 28 Thomas Love Peacock, The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, eds. H.F.B. Brett-Smith and C.E. Jones, vol. 1 (London, 1924-34), 312. 29 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 530. 30 Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. Wightman and J. Bryce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 293. 31 John Galt, The Literary Life, and Miscellanies, of John Galt, vol. 1 (London, 1834) 155. 32 Charles Lamb, ‘Imperfect Sympathies,’ The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E.V. Lucas, vol. 2 (London, 1903), 59. 33 Biographia Literaria 1 86-87. 34 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense, 4th ed. (1764, London, 1785), 39. 35 Hazlitt, Works, vol. 20, 327. 33 36 John Keats, ‘To George and Tom Keats,’ 21, 27 (?) December 1817, letter 45 of The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 193. 37 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 11. 38 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R.J. White (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972), 29. 39 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, vol. 1 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969), 476. 40 David Simpson, ed., The Origins of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel (Camridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 183. 41 Simpson, Origins, 193. 42 Shelley, Poetry and Prose, 535.