The Challenge of Coleridge by David Haney

Author:David Haney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

Similarly, Gerald Bruns suggests, with direct reference to the Romantic hermeneutic tradition, that the entire process of understanding is a matter of adopting the position of an “other” that exists within each of us: “Understanding, whether of oneself or another, is just the wearing of masks” (Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern 161). The value of such a procedure for the development of personal identity is suggested by Altieri’s comments on the importance of “style” as a means of connecting the intending, first-person self with the third-person self that is observable in the world: “where style is concerned there are not selves and worlds, nor even first- and third-persons, but rather endless and irreducible modes for weaving the two together so that substance is inseparable from the shapes intentionality takes” (Subjective Agency 87).27 Coleridge, of course, gives ontological and ethical priority to “inner” conceptions such as will over “outer” conceptions such as masks or style, but the temporal priority of the external to the internal in natural history, moral life, and religious history gives it an important kind of necessary anteriority, as in this notebook entry on the relation between “will” and “deed”: “The will to the deed, the inward principle to the outward Act, is as the Shell to the Kernal to the Shell; but yet, I. The Shell is necessary for the Kernal, & that by which it is commonly known; & 2. As the Shell grows comes first, & the Kernal grows gradually & hardens within it, so is it with the Moral principle in man—Legality precedes Morality in every Individual, even as the Jewish Dispensation precedes the Christian in the Education of the world at large” (CN 3: 4003).

The trying on of roles was even more a part of Coleridge’s life than of most lives, as he shifted uncomfortably among the roles of Pantisocrat, husband, father, poet, dejected lover, journalist, critic, dramatist, philosopher, Sage of Highgate, etc. As the example of drama shows, the “if I were” (though I know I am not) of “hypocritically” identifying with Don Juan is of ethical value not just because we may in fact end up becoming that which we pretend to be, as in many of Booth’s examples. Coleridge also ascribes a value to the trying on of characters we know we will not become, but not in any simple sense of being warned away from such characters. This giving in to illusion is also not simply the “relatively cost free offer of trial runs” that Booth finds in the ethical experience of fictions (The Company We Keep 485), because the imaginative identification with a Don Juan exacts the very real cost of a division within the subject.

For Coleridge, as this suggests, tragedy works somewhat as a “thought experiment,” which Ricoeur says is one of the functions of literature in general (Oneself 159), but Coleridge finds a different purpose than that ascribed to such experiments by Ricoeur. We perform the “thought experiment” of identifying with Don Juan or Iago, willing ourselves into an acknowledged illusion.

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