Coleridge's Writings Volume Two: On Humanity
ed. Anya Taylor
(Macmillan
ISBN 0-333-54851-5)
(The Coleridge
Bulletin New Series No 6 (Autumn
1995), pp 49-53)
Coleridge's Writings, under the general editorship of John
Beer, is a project designed to gather together in few volumes Coleridge's most
significant thoughts on his major interests and concerns. In this respect it is
a project that can be welcomed by specialist and non—specialist alike, as it
will serve both as an introduction and as a resource. And it is clear from the
title of this volume and those in preparation that it has been conceived not in
accordance with the fault—lines of conventional disciplines, but largely in
accordance with Coleridge's own intellectual habits and methods. In the effort
to let Coleridge speak for himself, this is very welcome, but it will probably
make the search for particular statements more difficult: it is notable, in this
volume for
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instance, how many pages have been
dedicated to Coleridge's vigorous attack on the slave—trade — quite rightly, as
he believed that trade profoundly dehumanizing —but the passages chosen could
equally well have taken their place in the first volume, On Politics and Society, edited by John Morrow.
Anya Taylor has divided her presentation into five sections:
1: Enquiries into the Nature of Man — principally Coleridge reacting against
the materialist and eighteenth century views of man as a bit of paper whirled
by a cold wind, and attempting to discern a spiritual life coexistent with the
life of the body, describing which also forms a significant part of her general
introduction; 2: Questions of Species and Gender— man's distinction from and
relation to the natural world, including women; 3: The Difficulty of Sustaining
Humanity — the various and disabling forms of dependency, and the mistaking of
persons for things; 4: Transmitting Humanity — marriage, being a parent and
education; and 5: The Humanity of Human Beings — containing the archetypal
Coleridgean definitions and distinctions, Reason and Understanding, Imagination
and Fancy, Conscience and the Will, the distinctive activities of language
making and poiesis, concluding with an account of what the editor lucidly
presents as the interwoven emotions of love, guilt and yearning for
immortality.
Each section and subsection is introduced with a summary of
Coleridge's main lines of thinking on the subject, and almost every entry has a
one line heading to point the reader in the right direction; these are
certainly useful for the inexperienced reader, and quite often help the more
experienced to qualify their reaction to an entry. Occasionally, however, an
entry seems too curtailed to explain itself sufficiently: on p.233-4 we have
the resounding 'Language is the sacred Fire in the
Temple of Humanity',
which four lines later concludes:'With the
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commencement of a Public commences the
degradation of the Good and the Beautiful — both fade or retire before the
accidentally Agreeable —.' this animadversion to an idea so favoured by our
current language and politics needs either a comment from the editor or a
fuller context to realize its force. And one particularly complex note on touch
and double touch (p.28) is printed with reference numbers to which I couldn't
find the corresponding and probably very useful notes.
Perhaps as a consequence of my own preference for fixities
and definites, it seems that the first two sections lack the clarity and
distinction of the last three. Many of the entries in these first two parts
record Coleridge's tentative explorations of his own consciousness and so
contribute to an air of uncertainty. Although it may have been part of the
editor's aim to show how Coleridge arrived at his definitive propositions, I
can imagine that a reader not well acquainted with his various modes of writing
might wonder whether it is worth going on after the first dozen or so pages.
Given how central his Reason/Understanding distinction is to our recognition of
the distinctly human in us, and how it can be seen to underpin all those
distinctions which if not made undermine our humanity (idea/conception,
person/thing, conscience/consciousness, love/lust, religion/superstition), and
given how well Anya Taylor introduces this section, it seems to me a pity that
it does not stand at the head of the book.
Reason is also the key term for Coleridge's rejection of
those philosophies of human nature which, as Anya Taylor has made very clear
both in her own book, Coleridge's Defense of the Human, and in her introduction
here, he believed undermine the proposition that man's spiritual life is
continuous with his day-to-day consciousness. In his introduction, John Beer
states that Coleridge believed love 'to provide the key to an understanding of
the humanity of human beings', and it certainly supplies Coleridge with some of
his
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most coherent insights into the
relations between immediate and spiritual consciousness, yet the subsection
which contains Coleridge's specific thoughts on love comes last of all. It also
seems unfortunate that these particular notes are so widely separated from the
very short section (with a long and excellent introduction) on Persons, a key
term in Coleridge, very much under scrutiny when he was thinking about love as
a consequence of his relationship with Sara Hutchinson. And complex though some
of these passages are, they have an intensity which carries the reader forward,
which is not always true of the more general and tentative notions set down in
the first pages of this selection. I would therefore advise any reader not very
familiar Coleridge's work to read the last section first and then go back to the
beginning. They are more likely then to be in a position to grasp the
significance of various key terms found there, such as 'Reason' and 'Will',
which if not understood in a Coleridgean manner will add to the reader's
confusion, not their insight.
Presented with a book of this kind, perhaps every reader of
Coleridge, and inevitably every reviewer, will search for what they consider
one or two key—note entries, and be satisfied if they find them, disturbed if
they do not. Let me therefore say at once that I think the essential Coleridge
is present in this selection, and that the appearance of a few other possible
entries would make very little difference to the overall insight to be gained
from this volume. However, I would like to have seen in the section on
Imagination that very interesting entry beginning 'But only as a man is capable
of ideas....' (CN IV 4692) — which has been discussed by several commentators,
including Antony Harding who made significant use of it in a notable paper on
the idea of evil in Coleridge, given to the Summer Conference 1994. And one
other notion, important I think, is absent from this selection: that of
conscience preceding consciousness (which is why Coleridge always linked
goodness and creativity, and why he described an undevout poet as mad) and
which is presented forcefully in N26 ff 39-40.
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All selections rightly bear the mark of their editor, and
this volume might have been justly entitled, 'Coleridge the Humanist'. Although
it does not fudge Coleridge's absolute commitment to truth as transcendental,
neither does it point it up quite in the manner that his position justified. I
can imagine that there might have been sections on Faith, on Ideas, and on
Religion, all of which were essential to Coleridge's idea of our humanity, and
which for him all cocentered on the person of Christ. Perhaps the one
significant omission from this book is Coleridge's search in himself for that
figure, his despair and his faith fighting it out in his last years, still one
of the least documented dramas of his life.