Nicholas Halmi. The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol.

Brooks, Linda M.

Nicholas Halmi. The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. 206. $90.00.

In looking at objects of Nature I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new ... a word--a symbol. It is [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] the Creator.

--Coleridge

Coleridge's tentative formulation of an immanent spirituality in language epitomizes the Romantic quest for a poetry that captures noumenal and phenomenal realms. Yet despite the characteristic nature of this quest in Romanticism, the idea of a "consubstantial" symbol as Coleridge called it has remained vague, a concept rarely examined with a view to its genesis or implications. Much work still needs to be done by way of exploring and explaining how Romantics conceived such "symbolical language" and how its apparent consubstantiality operated. What were its functions? What form did it finally come to take and why? These are some of the questions that Nicholas Halmi confronts in his book The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol.

Following the later Foucault, Halmi promises an unconventional approach to his topic. Instead of using an historical or archeological method (tracing the symbol's history or genesis), he undertakes what he calls a "genealogy," or a random sampling of the contingent and often contradictory forces behind the evolution of an idea or social trend. Genealogy's superiority, Foucault argued, lies in its indifference to history's telic focus, and in its ability to uncover the contingent, otherwise unexplainable twists of historical forces, the transitions from one way of thinking to another--something archaeologies or histories fail to do. While Halmi's study cannot really be called a genealogy in this sense--or even a history for that matter--and while it is not nearly as unconventional in its approach or in its findings as it claims to be, it is most assuredly an admirable work of traditional scholarship.

Halmi begins his task of "Defining the Symbol" by rejecting de Man's celebrated focus on allegory as the Romantic trope par excellence. Not only, we are told, wasn't the formation of the Romantic symbol crucially dependent (as de Man would have it) on a corresponding denigration of allegory, but its universality made it indistinguishable from allegory or any other literary trope. (Indeed, Halmi argues, a number of the Romantics' theorizing on the topic did not even entertain an allegory/symbol opposition [13].) Far from being a mystified veil over the signifier/signified discontinuity (8), the Romantic symbol was not even--and, in Halmi's view, was much more than--a trope in the semiotic sense of a linguistic sign. Less a systematic concept than a philosophical aspiration, it remained a hazy notion whose many forms converged in the rather vague goal of discovering human significance in the world.

Having argued that the Romantic symbol's universality undermined its critical or semiotic function, Halmi posits that its value for scholars lies instead in the realm of "intellectual history, insofar as that discipline seeks to identify the social functions of concepts in the contexts of their historical formation" (18). His own genealogy of the Romantic quest for meaning is guided by his stated assumption that "the principal concern of [the Romantics'] symbolist theory was not in identifying, still less in interpreting, actual symbols, but instead in establishing an ideal of meaningfulness itself. Once it was determined that symbols did not have to be instituted--that is, they did not have to be recognized as symbols in order to function as such, or at least be declared to do so--then the concept of the symbol could be used as the theoretical justification of a disposition to discover meaning precisely where it was not intuitively evident" (19).

The Romantics' use of the symbol in their quest for non-intuitive meaning is especially evident in Schelling's Naturphilosophie. In this metadiscipline, the measurable sensory signs uncovered by the natural sciences (mathematics, physics, chemistry) are interpreted in light of "the categories through which life is comprehended in its coherence" so as to reveal what Dilthey calls their "significance" (22). In Wordsworth, such significance is what lightens the heavy and weary weight of all this unintelligible world, the rocks and stones among which Lucy rolls; in Novalis it is the world of "'stones, trees, [and] animals which must speak in order for man to ... recollect himself'" (24); in Shelley it is the solid universe veiling the self-defining power unearthed by genuine poetical insight. Designed to bridge the arenas of noumena and phenomena, the Romantic symbol is a medium linking humanity to the world.

Despite the attention given to Naturphilosophie, Halmi continues to insist that his focus is not Romantic theories of the symbol, but the motivating factors behind these theories. In keeping with his genealogical approach, he wants to determine "what cultural questions or needs motivated the formulation of symbolist theory, and what cultural conditions (philosophical, scientific, political) affected the forms that the theory assumed" (26). These cultural questions and conditions are interrelated: questions about a transcendent significance in the natural world are shown to be rooted in the anti-religious and anti-rationalist conditions of the Enlightenment. Indeed, more than the Romantic Naturphilosophen, it is the Enlightenment philosophes who play a key, albeit problematic and perplexing, role in this study. On the one hand, the French Encyclopedists focused on the "self-evidentness" of the truth, and sought to strip away the layers of rationalist and religious commentary that had obscured sensory nature and obstructed the pursuit of empirical knowledge. On the other hand, the Encyclopedists were dissatisfied with the partial and piecemeal perspectives of the truth they were accumulating, and yearned to make the Encyclopedia something more. As a form of "compensation for the impossibility of possessing a definitive understanding of either nature or the totality of human knowledge" (32), the Encyclopedists sought to create a man-made map of nature in its entirety that would ultimately come to replace nature itself.

Halmi provocatively suggests that the Enlightenment project of using pieces of nature--quite literally in the case of landscapes--as compensatory aesthetic representations of the wholeness of the truth and of the infinite as a whole (33) is a crucial formative moment in the emergence of the Romantic symbol. However, the question of whether the Enlightenment endeavor to represent Nature in its totality played a positive or negative role in Romantic efforts to theorize the symbol remains a vexing issue. The project of the Encyclopedia, we are given to understand, entailed the subjective substitution of the phenomenal in the place of the noumenal, and of the finite in the place of the infinite--a substitution resisted by earlier thinkers like Descartes, Galileo, and Salviati with their distrust of sensible intuition (34). Yet the ultimate synthesis of the phenomenal and the noumenal sought by the Romantics, and anticipated by the Encyclopedists, was nearly undone by another Enlightenment figure--Immanuel Kant. His theory of the sublime brought the limitations of the human imagination into sharp relief by confronting it with the overwhelming expanse and power of the infinite. The inability of the senses to ever grasp transcendental ideas (chiefly Kant's Moral Law)--which can only be inferred through this inability--presented a formidable obstacle to the Romantic dream of a consubstantial symbol that wedded the noumenal and the phenomenal. Despite Kant's occasional nods to beauty's efficacy as a "symbol of morality," such a symbol was only an abstract "aesthetic idea" that reminded us that our phenomenal understanding was incapable of grasping the noumenous ideal of the sublime itself.

In his chapter "Burdens of Enlightenment," Halmi elaborates this subversion of Romantic efforts to construct a theory of the symbol that unifies noumena and phenomena in a knowable object or idea. Yet despite an extensive discussion of Kant's Critique of Judgment (specifically the "Analytic of the Sublime," which had been the topic of one of his earlier published articles), Halmi doesn't satisfactorily explain how the Romantics were "burdened" by Kant. Although he follows the noted Kant scholar Paul Guyer in acknowledging the failure of the third Critique's attempt to bridge the rational and moral (or practical) arenas of Kant's first two Critiques, Halmi doesn't show the decisive effect this failure had on pre-Romantic Friedrich Schiller, major theorist of Romanticism, on Coleridge--English Romanticism's key theorist--and on other Romantics. This omission may be insignificant to those who have investigated Kant's views of sublimity, and who know its devastating implications for Romantic attempts to unify subject with object and noumena with phenomena. For readers unfamiliar with the effects of Kant on Romantic and pre-Romantic thinkers, however, Halmi's seven-page discussion of the "Analytic of the Sublime" may seem somewhat unconnected to his main argument.

Once the Critique of Judgment ruled out the possibility of a consubstantial form of expression, the Romantics were forced to "find a securer basis on which to claim that the nouminousness of aesthetic ideas--their distinctive ability to stimulate a multitude of thoughts without being graspable in a determinate concept--actually inhered in the objects they presented to the senses" (61). In the chapter "Uses of Philosophy," Halmi goes to great length to show how the Romantics were assisted in this regard by the Enlightenment philosophes. Despite their atheism and their sharp dualist distinction between noumenal and phenomenal realms, the philosophes are credited with laying the framework for a Romantic theory of the symbol. In order to substantiate this claim, Halmi identifies four anti-dualist tendencies in the Enlightenment: a renewed interest in the sensible, a rebirth of the microcosm/macrocosm analogy, a revived Spinozan monism made respectable by Lessing, and a replacement of mechanistic with vitalist theories of matter. He then argues that these four Enlightenment tendencies in turn gave rise to three key pre-Romantic developments: a growing insistence on the concreteness of expression; the discovery, within the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, that man's link to Nature ensured a meaningful relation between humanity and nature (83); and a sense that the organicism delineated by Schelling in the natural world presaged a new vitalism in the realm of symbolic objects.

This nexus of anti-dualist ideas culminates for Halmi in Coleridge's celebrated theory of the symbol--the subject of the study's penultimate chapter, "The Uses of Religion." The chapter centers on Coleridge's "sui generis" notion of consubstantiality--the idea, suggested in the epigraph above, that God resides in the symbolic bread and wine of Christian ritual. The importance Halmi attaches to this chapter is evident early in its uncharacteristically polemic tone, particularly his use of MacFarland's emphasis on Romanticism's core theological beliefs to refute Abrams' idea of Romanticism as secular religion (99, 123-24). All of Halmi's prodigious scholarship would seem to be marshaled now to support his central thesis--namely, that the Romantic theory of the symbol, as most completely formulated by Coleridge, is essentially based on the theological principle of consubstantiality, rather than on any sublimated idea found in aesthetic philosophy. This theology-based view of the symbol is presented as non- if not ir-rational: "To claim the concept [of the symbol] for theology," he writes, "is to reclaim it from aesthetics, and in that respect the claim constitutes an assertion of custodial rights rather than an act of explanation. What the symbol gains by being subsumed under the category of the theological is not greater clarity but greater legitimacy, since its irrationality can now be dignified as a mystery of transcendent origin" (101). But by suggesting that the irrationality of Coleridge's theological conception of the symbol closes it off from any rational debate and puts it beyond the reach of critical analysis and discussion ("more than once [Coleridge] affirmed the principle rein credimus, modum nescimus--a refusal of explanation--to be the 'most rational Doctrine'" [131]), Halmi seems to claim the same critical immunity for himself. His avowal that "my purpose is not what Coleridge himself could have meant when he wrote of Christianity or the Trinity, but what those terms would have to mean in order to make comprehensible the relation of his symbolist theory to the theological tradition" (109-10) allows him to assert his own "custodial rights" over Coleridge's ideas, and to appropriate more authority and legitimacy for his argument.

Whether one accepts or rejects Halmi's account of the essentially theological nature of the Romantic symbol, there is good reason to question his account of the method he has used in his study--his "genealogical" exploration of the social, political, and philosophical tendencies that contributed to the Romantics' theological conception of the symbol. From the perspective of the Coleridge chapter, most of the scholarly material presented in the earlier chapters appears to have been carefully assembled and positioned to prepare the reader for the conclusions "reached" in the Coleridge chapter. This linearity might not be a problem had Halmi not made so much of the apparent randomness of his study, and of his indebtedness to Foucault's genealogical method with its emphasis on the accidents and discontinuities of historical events. But this randomness seems unnecessary and misleading by the time the reader arrives at the Coleridge chapter and senses that the study has been following a fairly straightforward and predictable trajectory leading towards the telos of theological consubstantiality.

This linear logic continues on into the final chapter, "The Uses of Mythology," which examines efforts to extend Coleridge's vision of a connection between the individual and the natural world through the consubstantial symbol to a communion between humanity and Nature through a new universal mythology. Taking as his model an anonymous fragment unearthed in Berlin in 1913--the "So-called 'Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism'" (c. 1796), which he translates and includes in an appendix--Halmi traces Romanticism's attempt to substitute a renovating mythos of organic unity for the mechanistic dualism of industrialized life (143). The vehicle for such a unifying system is the aesthetic object which, uniting reason and the senses in our appreciation of beauty, partakes of the governing idea of morality and society (144-45). It's puzzling why Halmi uses this one-page fragment instead of Schiller's complete and detailed plan for the same solution in the Aesthetic Education of Man, a work which Halmi agrees is the source for this fragment (142). In any case, while some of the more idealistic German Romantics may have hoped that this mythology would be a universal panacea for the divisiveness plaguing mankind, the most that could be achieved--as Halmi, citing Blake, points out--was for "every truly creative individual ... to create his own mythology" (157). In the absence of a universal mythology based on the unifying power of the symbol, the Romantics could only fall back on the theological idea of the symbol's consubstantial nature.

Some of the confusion arising from Halmi's "conclusion" stems from the fact that the final chapter is the only one written expressly for this book. (The other chapters appeared earlier as part of various articles--one focusing on allegory and the sublime [1992], another on mind and microcosm [2001].) As a result, this 2007 study lacks some of the coherence and clarity one expects to find in an original work that sets forth a central idea about a particular topic. Despite Halmi's promise at the opening of the study to deal "strictly" with the symbol as a "theoretical construct whose purpose was not to describe objects of perception but to condition the perception of those objects" (1), it's often unclear how his numerous excurses on diverse topics are related to this idea. The study's copious footnotes tend to distract rather than illuminate the main text. One has the impression that Halmi, who co-edited one of the volumes in the majestic Princeton Collected Coleridge series in which footnotes typically take up more space on the page than the main text, succumbed to a similar scholarly impulse in this study; only towards the end of the book does he return to his stated purpose in writing the volume. Given his considerable scholarly erudition, Halmi seems less at home as a genealogist or even as a historian than as an encyclopedist in his own right--less, perhaps, in the manner of Coleridge with his quest for unity, than of the Enlightenment Encylopedists who aimed at achieving a totality.

Linda M. Brooks

The University of Georgia