Coleridge and the Concept of Nature by Raimonda Modiano (review)

1 10Rocky Mountain Review RAIMONDA MODIANO. Coleridge and the Concept of Nature. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1985. 270 p. In this thought provoking book, Raimonda Modiano analyzes how Coleridge viewed nature during various stages in his career. She seeks to explain an excessive naturalistic zeal in the early Coleridge and his subsequent withdrawal from a direct involvement with nature. She reviews Coleridge's life as a poet, a critic, and philosopher, and evaluates his relationship with the Wordsworths and Sara Hutchinson. She reveals that through Coleridge's various writings — his poetry, his personal journals and letters, his marginalia to works of German Naturphilosophen, his religious and philosophic writings, he finally was able to reconcile the rival tenets of dynamic philosophy and Christian orthodox thought. Because of the fragmentary state of many of Coleridge's writings, and the overlapping of his developing ideas, Modiano emphasizes the difficulty in presenting Coleridge in "lines of smooth development." As she says, "although Coleridge is moving forward in time, changing his views, developing new intellectual allegiances, he nevertheless retains ideas and preferences that he developed at an earlier time." She pursues Coleridge's involvement with nature generally in three stages: "from an early period of intense infatuation with its picturesque beauty, to a stage of alienation and grave doubts about the value of encounters with nature, to a later phase of 'higher synthesis' in which nature is given a prominent place in Coleridge's philosophic system" (5). Coleridge was influenced by picturesque aesthetics in his early perception of nature. For him it is "the external world as an object of imaginative experience (either in immediate encounters by direct observation of the appearances of nature or encounters mediated by poetry) and aesthetic contemplation" (6). Coleridge had to work this out through personal encounters with nature and its beautiful landscapes which he experienced in the English Lake District with the Wordsworths and in his subsequent travels to Scotland, Germany, and Italy. He later had to regard his celebration of nature "as a medium of divine revelation . . . to a denunciation of nature as a dangerous ground of identification for the self. ' ' In fact Modiano shows that Coleridge in his later poems and notebooks drew his symbols from love objects instead of nature. His development of symbol became rooted less in the natural world and more in a mental journey "from the particular to the universal, from the finite to the infinite, from a specific image to the informing idea or 'free life' behind it" (81). Modiano notes that "the more Coleridge emphasized the transcendence of the infinite ? AM' and the craving of a self-conscious subject to attain access to, if not full knowledge of, the Absolute, the more likely it is that he would tend to divest the symbol altogether" (82). The last part of Modiano's study surveys the aims oíNaturphilosophie and precisely analyzes Coleridge's adaptations of the systems of Kant, Schelling, and Steffens which are based on his marginalia. His main additions to and modifications of the systems of Naturphilosophen consist in introducing clearer boundaries between powers and physical bodies, between the constitutive and modifying forces of nature. Yet, as Modiano concludes, "In his system of nature, Coleridge's most drastic departure from the Naturaphilosophen consists in establishing a supernatural rather than a cosmic source for the two primary forces of nature, light and gravitation" (201). Ultimately, the culmination of Coleridge's system of nature is the concept of the Trinity because the Trinity "also stabilized for him his conflicting attitudes towards nature" (201). Through the symbol Coleridge attempted to protect the sanctity of the concrete objects of experience by insisting on their continuity with a divine essence. Book Reviews111 For Coleridge the Christian religion clearly established the place of nature and of man in relationship to nature (203). But though the Trinity represented the culmination of Coleridge's system of nature, he was also influenced by elements from dynamic philosophy. Even though Naturphilosophen with its emphatic rejection of appearances did not give him the concrete nature he wanted, Christianity did not allow a zealous attachment to it. Therefore, Coleridge "to the end of his Ufe, retained a keen interest in nature...