David P. Haney. The Challenge of Coleridge: Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy.

Barth, J. Robert

David P. Haney. The Challenge of Coleridge: Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii + 309. $55.00.

Let it be said at once that David Haney has given us a remarkable and important book. Its goal is to read Coleridge in the context of modern thinking on ethics and hermeneutics, and its strategy is to create a kind of "meta-conversation," bringing Coleridge into a serious intellectual exchange with such thinkers as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas. As Haney says at the close of his dense and richly textured argument, "The point is not to catalogue either the blindness or the insight on either side of the conversation, which would suggest the hubristic possibility of rising above the conversation itself. The point is rather to have the conversation and reflect on it." This conversation "needs no justification beyond itself" (262).

The first important parallel between Coleridge and Gadamer is the use they both make of what has come to be called the "hermeneutic circle," in which "the parts of a text can be understood only in the context of an evolving foreknowledge of the whole" (5), and Haney suggests that "an important link between hermeneutics and ethics" can be found in the "ethical implications" of the circle (5). Coleridge, who (like Gadamer) is "deeply rooted in both the Protestant tradition of biblical hermeneutics and the German idealist tradition, sees the circle in theological terms with clear ethical implications." As Coleridge writes in Biographia Literaria: "In order to an efficient belief in Christianity, a man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths" (6). Gadamer parallels this in his comment on Rudolf Bultman: "All understanding presumes a living relationship between the interpreter and the text." This is, Haney says, "a requirement for 'fore-understanding'" (7).

The "evolving" of this circle is at the heart of Haney's endeavor. As Gadamer insists (in Haney's summary), "a work from the past means more than it did at the time in the sense that subsequent interpretations of a historical phenomenon form a part of 'the web of historical effects' that should prevent us from 'taking its immediate appearance as the whole truth'" (12). One might be reminded of Keats's "grand march of intellect," by which "a mighty providence subdues the mightiest Minds to the service of the time being"; of Shelley's evocation (in A Defence of Poetry) of "that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world"; or of T. S. Eliot's notion of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which allows our modern Hamlet to be in some way "more" than Shakespeare's.

The "challenge of Coleridge," Haney says, is "first and foremost to read him with an attentiveness both to his horizon and to our own that will enable his texts to 'speak' to us in a way that can produce insights into issues of common concern to the Romantics and to us" (8). Most of the other thinkers whom Haney engages are not commentators on Coleridge, but focus on the same issues of ethics and interpretation. Haney serves as a kind of moderator of the discussion, bringing the voices together, commenting on their similarities and differences, often pointing out how they shed light on one another.

At first blush, the idea of bringing Coleridge into dialogue with modern philosophy and literary theory might seem unprofitable of even quixotic. After all, Coleridge is deeply grounded in Christian faith, and many of his central preoccupations are theological, while much of modern philosophy and contemporary literary criticism--although at times reflective about religion--remains largely post-modern and secularist. However, Haney rightly insists on "the strong presence of Romanticism in the ethically diverse impulses of modern criticism" (9), and of course Coleridge is romanticism's primary theoretician. "The dialogue with Coleridge," Haney writes, "is partly a dialogue with the sources of our own questions and interests; not in the sense of a Bloomian agon, but in the more flexible sense that the complex mixture of problems, positions, and processes we label 'Romanticism' is an important source for many modern philosophical positions, albeit a source that is variously embraced, denied, rejected, ignored, and questioned. One reason why there are so many common areas of concern for Coleridge and us is that our thought is so thoroughly conditioned by Romanticism" (22).

No summary could do justice to the richness and complexity of the conversation Haney sets up, as it ranges widely through thinkers from aristotle to Kant, from Aquinas to Martha Nussbaum, and through such issues as the relevance of Aristotle's distinction between phronesis (ethical knowledge) and techne (productive knowledge) in Chapter 2, how "ought" can be derived from a knowledge of what "is" in Chapter 4, and "the relationship between literary criticism and moral philosophy" in Chapter 5. However, a four-page "Argument" in Haney's Preface (xiii-xvi) offers a helpful guide to which one can refer from time to time.

Chapter 3 ("Knowledge, Being, and Hermeneutics") holds a particularly important place in the dialogue, in that it deals with "how conceptual knowledge and practical experience are interconnected" (73). Haney says, very astutely: "For Coleridge, the question of the relationship between knowledge and being was situated within the hermeneutic circle of the relation between whole and part, universal and particular" (75). He also insists very rightly that Coleridge differs from Kant in that for Coleridge "the Ideas supporting our moral and physical world are constitutive, not merely regulative." (75). All too often, Coleridge has been accused of misunderstanding Kant; in fact, however, Coleridge understood Kant very well indeed, but chose to differ significantly from him in this crucial respect. The dialogue Haney sets up between Coleridge and Kant is in fact especially interesting and productive. Kant is given his due, but Haney clearly finds the Coleridgean position more tenable, perhaps because it has a theological ground unavailable to Kant. "Despite his strong Kantian sense of an unconditioned moral imperative," Haney says, Coleridge sees that imperative deriving "not from a formal law of reason, but from a Person who not only commands humanity, but also creates and loves it." The result is, he concludes, "a much thicker description of the unconditionally necessary than Kantian ethics allows, broadening the divine command from mere obligation to a mandate for creative existence (we are obligated to God, but we are also able to repeat, on a finite level, his creative act) and allowing non-or para-ethical factors such as 'love' to join ethical considerations in determining what we 'must' do" (79). Thus, "there remains a fundamental unity between moral and rational knowledge, because Reason is, as Logos, God's word, which is the ground of all knowledge" (80).

In this chapter, too, Haney begins an ongoing consideration of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which recurs throughout the book as a kind of paradigmatic example of the interplay between ethics and interpretation. As Haney writes in a later chapter, since "part of the task of ethical understanding is to speculate on potential rather than real others, and to imagine ourselves as others, as past and future selves" and "because Coleridge sees this hermeneutic, historical engagement in the world of others as ethically defined," the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is particularly relevant, for "that hermeneutic relationship is pursued partly through narratives, because it is the kind of understanding that works by telling the story of our engagement with others" (104). And Haney is quite as skillful in his treatment of Coleridge's poetry as he is with his philosophy. There is no shortcutting of the text, and his touch with imagery and poetic context is deft and sure, as it is elsewhere with such works as Coleridge's "Christabel" and Wordsworth's The Prelude.

Not surprisingly, given Coleridge's knowledge of the German "Higher Criticism," biblical hermeneutics is at times central to the conversation. For Coleridge, Haney says, "the Bible is the paradigmatic occasion for a communicative hermeneutic that is not solely dependent on authorial intention," for "the intentions of the biblical authors are less important than the process of reflection that occurs when the Bible is read in a spirit of faith that connects the historically alien horizons of the biblical authors with the modern reader's interpretive energy" (85-86). Thus, "the words of biblical authors mirror the faith of the interpreter who submits himself to those words. Intention is thus subject to a loss of ownership" (86). (In the context of biblical hermeneutics I must register one of my very few demurs. Haney speaks of "the Christian notion of incarnation" expressed in the Pauline word kenosis--the "emptying out" of Christ celebrated in the great hymn of Philippians 2:5-11--as "a depletion of God" [91], a characterization with which few biblical scholars are likely to agree nor, I think, would Coleridge. Apart from this, Haney's use of biblical material is admirably sure-footed.)

The notion of "submitting" to the words of scripture of a "loss of ownership"--is linked, I believe, with Haney's later consideration (in Chapter 5, "Literary Criticism and Moral Philosophy") of the idea of tragedy. In Coleridge's view, the spectator of the drama is called upon to make a "sacrifice," which "involves a combination of identification and alienation." Coleridge's "sacrificial spectator engages in a process of self-interpretation that differs from conceptual representation and that involves both loss and recovery," as in the plays of Shakespeare, where (in Coleridge's words) "every man sees himself without knowing that he sees himself" (148). Thus, for Coleridge, "tragedy depicts the loss of the ethical world that is then recovered by the spectator's interpretive activity," which "can only be accomplished by a 'sacrifice' of the spectator's moral certainty" (149).

One of the more compelling moments in the conversation of this book (in Chapter 6, "Oneself as Another: Coleridgean Subjectivity") sees Coleridge in relation to Levinas and Ricoeur (209-26). Levinas' "Hebraic sense of otherness" finds an echo in Coleridge's emphasis on God as "Absolute Will," while Ricoeur's "oneself as another" parallels Coleridge's insistence on the crucial role of the Logos both in theology and in human knowledge (225). Coleridge might be seen as bringing together these two very different views of the foundation of human knowledge and value. Whatever the theological differences among them, there is clearly important common ground.

Haney's respect for Coleridge's essentially theological grounding becomes centrally important in his superb final chapter (Chapter 7, "Love, Otherness, and the Absolute Self"). Arguing that after Kant's "exclusion of the affective realm from rational ethics ... philosophy has found it difficult to use human love as a paradigm for ethical relations" (230), Haney finds Coleridge's thought particularly salutary, since for Coleridge "human love is directly involved in the symbolic relation to God." In the Coleridgean view, "love is a human necessity and a function of human finitude and imperfection, but just as the symbol provides a link between the finite and the infinite, love provides a completion of the incomplete self" (231). With this foundation, Haney can move toward Coleridge's view of a "higher self," a self "that transcends self-interest" (254), an "eternal self" that "rises above the particularity of the individual self" (255). Such a view allows "a transcendent version of self to function as an other whose threat to the finite self is both devastating and productive of the highest form of moral freedom" (256).

Freedom is, in a sense, the final word in this conversation. As the "higher self" is grounded in the Absolute Self of the Godhead, so the human will takes its power from its participation in the Absolute Will. For Coleridge, "the conditional obdedience demanded by moral law does not conflict with the 'moral freedom' to which the self-annihilating activity of the transcendent self can lead, because individual choice is grounded in a higher 'freedom' that both annihilates and grows out of the choices of the individual self" (257). The crucial distinction Coleridge makes here (following Fichte) is between "will" and "choice."

In this view, freedom does not consist in the ability to choose, but rather in having made good choices. The higher form of freedom consists in a "habit of virtue," which demonstrates not only a single good choice but the "internalization of virtue not present in specific acts," and which thus engages "the whole moral being" (257-58). Such a "habit of virtue," achieved by a series of discrete good acts, is a "higher freedom." Once such a virtue has been achieved, "choice" may be no longer necessary--and yet one is truly free because one has already made one's choices. Thus, Haney says, "just as freedom in this higher sense is not to be confused with choice, necessity is not to be confused with compulsion," for, he goes on, "the free, rational decision to accept an authority detracts from neither the freedom of that decision nor the legitimacy of the authority accepted" (258-59). And ultimately, "on the theological level, the more we rise from a freedom based on individual choice to one based on a free assent to necessary truths, the freer we are" (259).

Although Schelling, Levinas and Ricoeur are very much part of the conversation at this point, other voices might also have been heard. The crucial Coleridgean distinction between freedom and choice brings to mind the distinction sometimes made within the Scholastic tradition between a Thomistic view that places the perfection of freedom in the ability to choose, and a view attributed to Augustine that sees the peffection of freedom in having chosen well or--to put it another way--in the freedom that comes from commitment. Clearly Coleridge is in distinguished company, here and throughout this remarkable conversation.

In the course of this "seminar" that spans so many years--indeed centuries--the many voices we hear are urgent and compelling. Coleridge is at the center--and the voices that swirl around him are vibrant and exciting,--but the voice of moderator David Haney, a voice of openness and reason, is crucially important. And he is indeed a splendid interlocutor. Haney's grasp of the vast Coleridge material is very impressive; he moves easily not only in the major philosophical and theological works--he is particularly fine with the Biographia Literaria and Aids to Reflection--but also in the more scattered but equally important notebook material and marginalia, as well as the whole library of Coleridge scholarship. As to his philosophical knowledge, one might almost call it Coleridgean in its range and sophistication.

If the "challenge of Coleridge" is "to read him with an attentiveness both to his horizon and to our own that will enable his texts to 'speak' to us," then David Haney has surely met the challenge. And the many-voiced conversation Haney has begun will continue, we may hope, for years to come.

J. Robert Barth, S.J. Boston College

J. ROBERT BARTH, S.J. is the James P. McIntyre Professor of English at Boston College. His most recent books are The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition (2nd ed., Fordham UP, 2001), The Fountain of Light: Studies in Romanticism and Religion. Essays in Honor of John L. Mahoney (Fordham UP, 2002), and Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Religious Imagination (U of Missouri P, 2003).