CHAPTER SEVEN
Toward a Definition of Reflection
It is, in many ways, the archetypal Romantic text. It begins as an anthology of extracts from Archbishop Robert Leighton, with notes by the editor. Later, the extracts are arranged systematically, so as to conform to a particular conceptual scheme. Meanwhile, the notion of a full-length commentary gradually assumes a larger role in the project. Eventually the commentary, rather than the Leighton extracts, becomes the principal feature of the work. Nor does it remain just a commentary. Instead, this commentary takes on a life of its own. It starts to talk about different fields of inquiry other than religion. Beyond that, it goes on to describe how they’re related to each other. When the work finally appears in print, it no longer has the name of Archbishop Leighton as author. Now the author is S. T. Coleridge. The title of the work is Aids to Reflection.1
Timewise, Aids to Reflection can be placed about halfway between Biographia Literaria (1817) and the unfinished Opus Maximum, which was to occupy Coleridge increasingly in his last years. The Biographia had been deeply immersed in systematic philosophy, out of which it had tried to fashion a literary/critical viewpoint. At that moment, Coleridge had hoped to solve the epistemological impasse of subjective/objective, in the belief that to do so would yield a multiple payoff. By the time he began work on Aids to Reflection, however, his attitude toward systematic philosophy had changed. His conceptual framework, in other words, was no longer that of German idealism. In his earlier years, Coleridge had seen a resolution of the subjective/objective impasse as foundational to his entire project. Hence its title: Logosophia. By that, I take it, he meant to indicate the primacy of systematic philosophy for his work. Its viewpoint would define what his project was about, its style of argument would dictate how he went about it. In the years after Biographia, however, Coleridge had begun to feel his way toward a different viewpoint, one where philosophy no longer possessed the same sort of primacy. Instead, he now came to see systematic philosophy more as a field like all the rest. And if he were to try to arrive at a higher viewpoint that could be applied to any field equally, it would have to be different from that of philosophy. Specifically, it would have to be broader in scope. In this fashion, then, Coleridge comes to see the necessity for what we might call theory.
Because of his shift from philosophy to theory, it was also natural for Coleridge to see his earlier reference points differently as well. During the Biographia period, Schelling had clearly been uppermost in his mind: the notoriously plagiarized chapter 12 (“Requests and Premonitions”) is all the evidence we need of that. But by the time of Aids to Reflection, Coleridge had gone back to Kant. At first glance, this might look somewhat regressive. To return to Kant more than a quarter-century after the critical philosophy had made its mark on the European intellectual scene, and after all that had happened since, might well seem hard to justify. Yet if we see Kant as primarily concerned about the process by which we arrive at knowledge or cognition, we get some sense of why he might appeal. Since Coleridge himself was now interested in metatheory, a philosophy that looked at how we arrive at knowledge in general could once more seem relevant. And since his notion of theory was based on knowledge or cognition rather than metaphysics, we can explain why he never managed to get into Hegel.
Perhaps the best description I can give of Aids to Reflection would be to call it a book about the way we do theory, rather than about theory itself. In that respect, you might say, it presents itself distinctly as a work of metatheory rather than one of theory. And, because of that perspective, it looks forward to where we now are. Historically, it could also look back on a quarter-century of theory work in many of the arts and sciences. Coleridge himself had witnessed the rapid rise of chemistry, thanks in part to the experimental wizardry of his friend Humphry Davy. At the same time, he was fully aware of how Kant’s successors had transformed philosophy. But, precisely because of his awareness of all these advances, Coleridge could feel as the Romantic era drew toward its close that perhaps the crucial task for someone like himself wasn’t to formulate theory for yet another field, but rather to think about the way we do theory. Because only then can we hope to arrive at some sense of what the consequences of theory might be. And that, as Coleridge realized, would be the most important issue for theory in years to come.
Coleridge also had a very different idea of what theory was really about. We’ve seen that German idealism had pursued reflexivity until it took on the more general form of a movement of return. Meanwhile the sciences had gradually come to theory by a slightly different road, one that eventually led them to incorporate the process by which we arrive at theory into the form of theory itself. For both philosophy and the sciences, nonetheless, the point of metatheory was to reveal what the form or shape of theory for any given field ought to be. Coleridge saw the matter differently. To him, theory wasn’t really about answers. As he perceived it, the value of a theory didn’t come from what it could tell us about a given field. No doubt a theory would try to organize knowledge within its chosen field. But for him its primary value was as a form of intellectual activity. As activity, theory meant aspiration. For Coleridge, then, all forms of theory were forms of aspiration, and all forms of aspiration expressed our quest for knowledge. To that extent, they all shared a common theme. And because they did, it was important to understand their relation to each other. That was what metatheory was for: not to answer all our questions about theory, but to show why the pursuit of theory was meaningful in terms of what it aspired to achieve. So metatheory lay beyond theory not as a higher form of theory, but for what it could tell us about that.
From a conversation recorded in Table Talk, we get some notion of how Coleridge perceived the role of metatheory:
My system is the only attempt that I know of ever made to reduce all knowledges into harmony; it opposes no other system, but shows what was true in each, and how that which was true in the particular in each of them became error because it was only half the truth. I have endeavored to unite the insulated fragments of truth and frame a perfect mirror. I show to each system that I fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then I lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to see its former position where it was indeed, but under another light and with different relations; so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained. (CC 14: 1, 248–49)
A “system” that would attempt to “reduce all knowledges into harmony” must involve some sort of metatheoretical viewpoint. Specifically, Coleridge says, “I show to each system that I fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then I lift up that system to a higher point of view … so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained.” To lift each of these “knowledges” up to a higher point of view, however, necessitates a perspective that can talk about those “knowledges” in terms of how they analyze their material. In other words, it would have to be able to talk about them as forms of theory.
For Coleridge, to talk about “knowledges” as forms of theory meant we would need to look at exactly how thought itself worked. As he saw it, every effort we make to think about or conceptualize a given subject takes one of two forms: reason or understanding. In Aids to Reflection he offered this analysis of reason:
Reason is the Power of universal and necessary Convictions, the Source and Substance of Truths above Sense, and having their evidence in themselves. Its presence is always marked by the necessity of the position affirmed: this necessity being conditional, when a truth of Reason is applied to Facts of Experience, or to the rules and maxims of the Understanding; but absolute, when the subject matter is itself the growth or offspring of the Reason. (CC 9: 216)
Subsequently, he goes on to talk about understanding in equal detail:
The Understanding then (considered exclusively as an organ of human intelligence,) is the Faculty by which we reflect and generalize. Take, for instance, any objects consisting of many parts, a House, or a group of Houses: and if it be contemplated, as a Whole, i.e. (as many constituting a One,) it forms what in the technical language of Psychology, is called a total impression. Among the various component parts of this, we direct our attention especially to such as we recollect to have noticed in other total impressions: the wall, the roof, the chimney, the window, the door. Then, by a voluntary Act, we withhold our attention from all the rest … to reflect exclusively on these; and these we henceforward use as common characters, by virtue of which several Objects are referred to one and the same sort. They are all Houses. Of each alike we repeat, It is a House. (CC 9: 224–25, with variants)
Perhaps the best way to distinguish between reason and understanding is in terms of theoretical autonomy.2 On this point, Coleridge clearly favors reason. To him, reason is a “Power.” Its power comes from the fact that it doesn’t have to go outside itself to generate inferences. In other words, it possesses its “evidence” within itself. Hence the “necessity” of its inferences. The only exception is when sensory data get involved. Under these circumstances, “necessity” is at best conditional. A mistaken perception, or insufficient empirical knowledge, might easily invalidate our inferences. Obviously, Coleridge is somewhat bothered by contingency of this sort. Compared to understanding, nonetheless, reason still displays a much greater degree of autonomy. Unlike reason, understanding has to rely wholly on sense data. If understanding is the faculty by which we reflect and generalize, it must be based on what we obtain from our experiences. In contrast to reason, then, it looks solely to external sources.
His distinction between reason and understanding gives Coleridge a means to critique the natural sciences.3 Specifically, he feels they exhibit a bias toward the empirical. For him, that bias has its source in the very way we apprehend Nature itself:
The Power which we call Nature, may be thus defined: A Power subject to the Law of Continuity … which law the human understanding, by a necessity arising out of its own constitution, can conceive only under the form of Cause and Effect. That this form (or law) of Cause and Effect is (relatively to the World without, or to Things as they subsist independently of our perceptions) only a form or mode of thinking, that it is a law inherent in the Understanding itself …—this becomes evident as soon as we attempt to apply the pre-conception directly to any operation of Nature. For in this case we are forced to represent the cause as being at the same instant the effect, and vice versâ the effect as being the cause—a relation which we seek to express by the terms Action and Re-action; but for which the term Reciprocal Action or the law of Reciprocity (germanicè Wechselwirkung) would be both more accurate and more expressive. (CC 9: 267–68)
But if we can take in what we perceive only within a framework of cause and effect, this, as Coleridge says elsewhere in Aids to Reflection, will mean that every event gets “subjected to the Relations of Cause and Effect: and the cause of the existence of which, therefore, is to be sought for perpetually in something Antecedent” (CC 9: 251). As a result, any attempt to understand nature becomes an endless quest for prior antecedents. For Coleridge, though, the problem isn’t primarily whether we can actually manage to specify these. Instead, what concerns him more is our perpetual subjection to the causal scheme, which blocks off the possibility of any other viewpoint. Because of our endless quest for antecedents, we can never rise to a higher level of analysis that might allow us to discern some broader or more general principle behind all natural activity. The real limitation, then, of cause/effect analysis lies in the way it hinders any sort of higher awareness.4
To counter the negative pull of cause/effect analysis, Coleridge believed the natural sciences would need to adopt a wholly different viewpoint, one that subordinated the understanding to reason. And that, in turn, would entail a different mode of inquiry for the sciences:
By a Science I here mean any Chain of Truths that are either absolutely certain, or necessarily true for the human mind from the laws and constitution of the mind itself. In neither case is our conviction derived, or capable of receiving any addition, from outward Experience, or empirical data—i.e. matters-of-fact given to us through the medium of the Senses—though these Data may have been the occasion, or may even be an indispensable condition, of our reflecting on the former and thereby becoming conscious of the same. (CC 9: 291)
How the natural sciences ought to deal with empirical data is really the issue here. To the extent that these sciences privilege understanding over reason, they inevitably submit to a causal framework. Since understanding can only reflect or generalize on empirical data, any scheme that favors it is bound to be subject to empirical data and hence to the causal framework it enforces. For that reason, Coleridge wants the sciences to take up a different stance toward the data they supposedly interpret. What he gives is a blueprint for the natural sciences as he thinks they ought to be, rather than as they are. Any science that consists of a “Chain of Truths” characterized by absolute necessity or necessarily true for the mind because of what it inherently is, can hardly qualify as one of the experimental sciences. Of course, Coleridge is well aware of that. Yet he seems to believe that the crucial prerequisite for any science is its capacity to arrive at inferences by itself: in other words, its autonomy as theory.
At the same time, Coleridge also wants to apply his reason/understanding distinction to religion. The result is a gloss on the myth of Original Sin:
In the temple-language of Egypt the Serpent was the Symbol of the Understanding in its twofold function, namely, as the faculty of means to proximate or medial ends … and again, as the discursive and logical Faculty possessed individually by each Individual—… in distinction from the Nous, i.e. Intuitive Reason, the Source of Ideas and ABSOLUTE Truths, and the Principle of the Necessary and the Universal in our Affirmations and Conclusions.… The first human Sinner is the adequate Representative of all his Successors. And with no less truth may it be said, that it is the same Adam that falls in every man, and from the same reluctance to abandon the too dear and undivorceable Eve: and the same EVE tempted by the same serpentine and perverted Understanding which, framed originally to be the Interpreter of the Reason and the ministering Angel of the Spirit, is henceforth sentenced and bound over to the service of the Animal Nature, its needs and its cravings, dependent on the Senses for all its Materials, with the World of Sense for its appointed Sphere. (CC 9: 258–62)
Here, then, we have “fallenness” in the guise of an intellectual mistake. Focused on proximate or medial ends, the understanding can’t see the need to defer to an ultimate end. Instead, it wants immediate gratification. The discursive/logical faculty is similarly shortsighted. Unlike the intuitive capacity of reason, it simply can’t grasp the thing itself. Consequently, it produces a discourse about that thing whose only hope is to describe it approximately. What Coleridge tries to explain next is how, under these conditions, understanding manages to subordinate reason. “The first human Sinner,” he says, “is the adequate Representative of all his Successors.” Adequate, presumably, because he has the same faculties, not just because he happens to come first. But the notion of a “Representative” also hints that the fall of reason can’t be reduced simply to a causal sequence that begins with an initial act by the “first human Sinner.” Subsequently, the text reinforces this hint in a distinctly Pauline fashion: “it is the same Adam that falls in every man.” For Coleridge, it all begins from “the same reluctance to abandon the too dear and undivorceable Eve.” What, though, does Eve signify? Not what we might expect (i.e., the feminine nature) but (as Coleridge makes clear in a note) our tendency to think in terms of what we perceive or apprehend. We can’t shake off that tendency (“too dear and undivorceable”) because we’re attached to the world we perceive and experience. And, because of our attachment, we fall into a particular relation to it, in which understanding becomes predominant. An understanding that the text portrays as “serpentine and perverted.” Originally intended as the “Interpreter of the Reason” and the “ministering Angel of the Spirit,” it was supposed to interpret the sense data we receive to the spirit. But, “sentenced and bound over to the service of the Animal Nature,” it becomes “dependent on the Senses for all its Materials, with the World of Sense for its appointed Sphere.” Yet we still need to explain why Eve should be “tempted” to subordinate the mind to the purely sensual. If we think of the understanding as essentially intellectual, we can imagine how it might seek to transform the purely sensory into a form of knowledge. Seduced by the empirical picture of things, however, it comes to adopt that as its own perspective.
More broadly, this gloss of Original Sin in terms of reason/understanding shows how we might look at religion. In particular, it suggests a way to elucidate religious lore by means of a conceptual perspective. Thus what looked like mere mythical narrative becomes a repository of arcane knowledge. In this fashion, we save narratives from dismissal as simple superstition. Instead, elements that reflect archaic beliefs or practices are reinterpreted. The social position of Eve vis-à-vis Adam, for instance, comes to symbolize the relation between empiricism and rationality. Or the notion of a demonic presence (i.e., the tempter) is transformed into a mental faculty. In addition, the use of a conceptual perspective on religion also significantly affects our view of historical time. Whereas myth is profoundly narrative or sequential, to see it conceptually takes away its temporal quality. When it is “the same Adam that falls in every man,” what we have is no longer a causal sequence based on a single, initial act. Because the Fall is reenacted in each individual, temporality becomes cyclical. As a result, the Fall turns out to be a permanent human condition rather than one that begins at a specific historical moment.
What Coleridge says about reason/understanding can also apply equally well to a different field of inquiry: in terms of psychology, it gives us an analysis of the will.5 In fact, one of the early sections of Aids to Reflection had already defined Original Sin as a malaise of the individual human will:
I profess a deep conviction that Man was and is a fallen Creature, not by accidents of bodily constitution, or any other cause, which human Wisdom in a course of ages might be supposed capable of removing; but diseased in his Will, in that Will which is the true and only strict synonime of the word, I, or the intelligent Self. (CC 9: 139–40)
At first glance, it may seem a bit odd for Coleridge to equate the I or “intelligent Self” with the will. Since he emphasizes intelligence, one might wonder about other possible equivalents of the self. For instance, why not mind, reason, or consciousness? Elsewhere in Aids to Reflection, we get a definition of will that distinctly hints at some of these: “For the personal Will comprehends the idea, as a Reason, and it gives causative force to the Idea, as a practical Reason.… or say:—the Spirit comprehends the Moral Idea, by virtue of it’s [sic] rationality, and it gives to the Idea causative Power, as a Will” (CC 9: 300). So will, as defined by Coleridge, displays an intellectual as well as volitional element. Intellectually we grasp a given idea, which, once grasped, is elevated to the level of Idea at the moment we act on it. Thus the concept of Will not only includes an intellectual element but even attempts to specify its relation to volition.
Subsequently, Coleridge comes back to Original Sin, which he can now treat more fully. He begins with a definition of will as opposed to nature:
Herein, indeed, the will consists. This is the essential character by which WILL is opposed to Nature, as Spirit, and raised above Nature as self-determining Spirit—this, namely, that it is a power of originating an act or state. (CC 9: 268)
Will, then, is equivalent to Spirit because of its capacity to originate an act. Conversely, if Nature is opposed to Spirit, what it lacks is presumably the capacity to originate. So the essential property of Nature must be continuity. In addition, the fact that Coleridge distinguishes between “Spirit” and “self-determining Spirit” would seem to indicate that not all forms of Spirit are self-determined. Yet the text specifically says Spirit implies the capacity to originate an act or condition. But if it has such a capacity, why shouldn’t it be self-determined? After all, isn’t that what makes anything self-determined?
At this point, we need to look at how Coleridge connects Original Sin to the will:
Sin is therefore spiritual Evil: but the spiritual in Man is the Will. Now when we do not refer to any particular Sins, but to that state and constitution of the Will, which is the ground, condition, and common Cause of all Sins; and when we would further express the truth, that this corrupt Nature of the Will must in some sense or other be considered as its own act, that the corruption must have been self-originated;—in this case and for this purpose we may, with no less propriety than force, entitle this dire spiritual evil and source of all evil, that is absolutely such, Original Sin. (CC 9: 273)
Now if Nature = that which can’t originate its own condition or acts, a “corrupt Nature of the Will” must by definition be a will that lacks this capacity. Yet the very essence of will, as we recall, lies in its capacity to originate its own condition or acts. So when Coleridge speaks of a “corrupt Nature of the Will” he must mean a will that’s lost its original capacity. Since the will is precisely that capacity, however, the only way it can possibly lose it must be by a self-initiated act. Thus his inference that “the corruption must have been self-originated.” And so we arrive at Spirit (i.e., will) as no longer self-determined because it’s lost the capacity to originate its own condition or acts. But even if this resolves the conflict posed by a will that isn’t self-determined, what remains unclear is how the will could ever lose its original capacity by an act that it commits of its own volition.
Here it seems useful to turn to what Coleridge says about the particular way Original Sin acts on the dynamics of the Will/Nature relationship:
For this is the essential attribute of a Will, and contained in the very idea, that whatever determines the Will acquires this power from a previous determination of the Will itself. The Will is ultimately self-determined, or it is no longer a Will under the law of perfect Freedom, but a Nature under the mechanism of Cause and Effect. And if by an act, to which it had determined itself, it has subjected itself to the determination of Nature (in the language of St. Paul, to the Law of the Flesh), it receives a nature into itself, and so far it becomes a Nature: and this is a corruption of the Will and a corrupt Nature. (CC 9: 285)
By means of cause and effect, then, we can finally explain how Original Sin takes away the will’s capacity to originate its own acts. Unlike the will, nature works by a “mechanism” of cause and effect. Hence the lack of any self-originated acts in nature. Instead, cause and effect always occur in a purely mechanical way: cause produces effect, which in turn acts as cause to create a subsequent effect, and so on indefinitely. Thus natural activity is continuous, but never self-determined, since every act has some prior cause, itself equally necessitated. So when the will subjects itself to what Coleridge calls “the determination of Nature,” it enters into the realm of cause and effect, where every act is externally determined. Imagine that the will originates an initial act (by which it subjects itself to Nature), that such an act forces a particular consequence, and that everything thereafter is determined by what precedes it. In this way, the will relinquishes its capacity to originate acts, since whatever it now does is determined by a prior act. Yet it continues to will its acts, by means of its volitional faculty. Its exercise of that faculty, however, is determined by an external agency. And so we get a will that isn’t self-determined. Or, as Coleridge says, it “receives a nature into itself, and so far it becomes a Nature.” Which means: it subordinates itself to some natural object and so falls under the sway of cause and effect.6
On a more general level, the analysis of Original Sin in terms of will shows how psychology can help to clarify religion. Specifically, psychology permits different spiritual conditions to be defined and explained. While the distinction between “fallen” and “unfallen” is probably essential to any form of belief that embodies a redemptive scheme, we might be hard pressed to say exactly what that distinction is really all about. In themselves, the terms “fallen” and “unfallen” have no content. We can’t simply draw on lexicology to specify what either condition consists of. Nor is the appeal to some sort of mythic narrative terribly useful. For a mythic narrative to be useful, we would have to explain at some point how the events of that narrative affect our present condition. Typically, this gets done in one of two ways: symbolically, or causally. But if we try to interpret a mythic narrative symbolically, we end up exactly where we were before—with the need to describe our condition in other, nonmythical terms. If we interpret a mythic narrative causally, however, we find ourselves forced to ascribe historical value to a text whose historical basis is at best questionable. By contrast, psychology gives concepts like “fallenness” or “unfallenness” a specific content. Instead of a vague appeal to some mythic narrative (which itself needs to be interpreted), we now obtain a clear, distinct definition of “fallenness” and “unfallenness” in terms of the capacity of an individual to originate his or her own acts. Even more important, perhaps, the notion of a capacity in the will to originate its own acts helps to explain how the shift from an “unfallen” to a “fallen” condition might take place. If we add the notion of a sphere of activity governed by necessity (the cause/effect model), we can then see how a particular kind of act initiated by the will (pursuit of an object causally defined or determined) could compromise the capacity to originate acts, which produces the shift from an “unfallen” to “fallen” condition.
Finally, beyond any specific “knowledges” (philosophy, natural sciences, religion, psychology), we have the question of how Aids to Reflection sees theory in general. To some extent, this is what makes the work unique. Unlike most Romantic theorists, Coleridge doesn’t favor a particular theoretical viewpoint. Instead, he simply wants to relate different fields and/or viewpoints. In fact, the absence of a single dominant viewpoint in Aids to Reflection is of special importance. It implies that ultimately the work isn’t about either fields of inquiry or viewpoints. Throughout his life, Coleridge had consistently shown great interest in the process by which we arrive at theory. Arguably, we might even maintain that Aids to Reflection is more about how we arrive at theory than about any given theory. Essentially, then, the significance of the work can be found in what it has to say about the genesis of theory. For Coleridge, how we arrive at theory is more important than any actual theory insofar as it reveals, more richly and expressively than theory itself possibly could, why we should care about theory. And, to the extent that thought is dynamic rather than static, more committed to its quest for knowledge than to the forms it employs to frame its perceptions, perhaps what’s most meaningful about it is the process by which it comes to be.7
For Aids to Reflection, any inquiry into the formation of thought has to begin with our experiences. But experience, as Coleridge sees it, isn’t just sensory data. In fact, all of our experiences reflect a fundamental tension between internal and external, mind and world. They show the role of sense data, and of our own cognitive faculty. Obviously, sense perception has to be the basis for any kind of reflection. What isn’t so clear is where to go from there. In particular, we might wonder whether reflection can ever become wholly independent of sense data. Consequently, Aids to Reflection is about how the mind moves from the purely sensory to thought. At the same time, Coleridge remains mindful of what happens when we rely excessively on the purely sensory. Hence his caution against an overemphasis on empirical data in the natural sciences.
What experience means as a category comes into play most fully, however, only within religion. In a prescient way, Coleridge had foreseen the difficulties that would beset any form of traditional religious belief in the modern era. His effort to rethink Original Sin in terms of a “fallen” consciousness enslaved to the external world seeks to redirect religious sensibility toward the experiential. Thus we no longer need to prove Original Sin historically (impossible anyway, given the mythic status of the Genesis narrative). Instead, we find traces of it in our own personal experiences. Much of this, of course, harks back to Augustine. Nonetheless, even a recovery of Augustine counts as a significant move given the simultaneous rapprochement with Kantian philosophy. Meanwhile, Coleridge also sought to demonstrate the need for redemption experientially. We feel “an aching hollowness in the bosom, a dark cold speck at the heart” (CC 9: 24). Likewise, we get a moving account of conversion as a journey: with its attendant anxiety, like that caused by shapes from our dreams that continue to haunt our consciousness after we awake, we set out on our way, somewhat uncertainly, in the morning twilight (CC 9: 35–38).
From another standpoint, it seems equally appropriate to describe the tendency of Aids to Reflection as one of aspiration. Here Coleridge himself offers the best commentary. In a discussion of various plant and animal species, he observes: “All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving” (CC 9: 118). Above all, they strive to make the spiritual prevail over the material. The opposition between reason and understanding shows what’s at issue. On the one hand, you have a tendency to subordinate thought to sense data. With that comes an emphasis on external objects, and a disposition to consider only those forms of thought that either address external objects, or our thoughts about these (in short, the “school of Locke”). Not that other forms of thought are explicitly denied. But there is a definite tendency to privilege the immediate, sensory sphere. On the other hand, you have an effort to subordinate sense data to thought. In practice, it leads to modes of thought that don’t depend on sense data directly, and, in some instances, not at all. Here the basic impulse is to make thought reflect on itself. Unlike the emphasis on sense data, however, reason doesn’t try to deny what lies outside its sphere. Instead, it simply intellectualizes the sensory. The empirical bias of the natural sciences would subordinate thought to sense data. The opposite tendency points toward religion. How it all works becomes evident only in psychology. For Coleridge, we make the spiritual prevail over the material, or reason over understanding, only by an effort of will. Philosophy informs us what the consequences are.
In the end, all his effort to affirm the spiritual over the material has, for Coleridge, just one objective: to make reflection possible. In the Introductory Aphorisms to Aids to Reflection, he had already spoken of “the light which is the eye of this soul.” Of it he observes: “This seeing light, this enlightening eye, is Reflection.” Yet, as he goes on to say, it’s more than that. Above all, we should “know too, whence it first came, and still continues to come—of what light even this light is but a reflection. This, too, is THOUGHT: and all thought is but unthinking that does not flow out of this, or tend towards it” (CC 9: 15–16). So all human thought is but a reflection of divine thought, the human mind a finite embodiment of the divine Mind. Yet if the human mind is, as Coleridge says, a reflection of the divine Mind, the activity of our minds must be, by implication, a reflection of its activity as well. But the activity of the divine Mind leads to creation. By a tradition that goes back to Augustine and to the biblical exegesis of Philo of Alexandria, and even beyond that to Plato himself, Coleridge could assert that the creation of the world takes place through divine thought. By analogy, then, reflection must create an image of the world, and so give us a notion of what creation is like. And if to imitate the divine Mind is ultimately Godlike, the effect must be to make us better than we now are. Hence the rationale for all the relationships Coleridge had sought to specify between different fields of inquiry. By means of these relationships, we obtain a conception of the whole for which each remains, in itself, but a partial explanation. And with that conception of the whole, we arrive at some sense of the world as a totality.
In many ways, Aids to Reflection marks a special moment both for Coleridge and for the history of Romantic theory. Special, because in this work Coleridge doesn’t have a specific agenda for theory in mind. Unlike the Logosophia or Opus Maximum project, Aids to Reflection doesn’t try to make a point about a given field. Instead, what it does is to step back a bit from theory, in order to look at it from a more external viewpoint. And that gives the work a special place in the history of Romantic theory. After the rise of theory in the wake of the Revolution and, subsequently, the Napoleonic era, what we have, at the end, is a tendency to question theory, to ask whether it actually delivers what it professes to give, and what its place finally ought to be. In that discussion, Coleridge plays a crucial role. To assess theory properly, he felt, you couldn’t be engaged in the formation of theory within an individual field. To arrive at a theory within a given field you had to do theory. And if you did theory, you couldn’t focus on how you did it. To do theory within a given field, you had to get into a particular mode of thought. For Coleridge, to do theory is to generalize. To become aware of how you did theory, you had to be able to see how you generalized. And that required a very different sort of perspective.
At the same time, the sort of perspective Coleridge proposed wasn’t merely external to theory. For him, it also had to be on a higher level. What we get, then, is metatheory as opposed to theory. As Coleridge saw it, a theory couldn’t really achieve this sort of perspective on itself. In that respect, his notion of metatheory differs in a crucial way from that of his predecessors. It didn’t grow directly or naturally out of theory. In other words, you didn’t simply ascend from theory to metatheory. On the contrary: theory was unenlightened about itself. And that implied, in turn, the need for a higher perspective. For Coleridge, a theory couldn’t “see” itself because its formation relied less on perception than on a mode of formal development. In order to generalize, you had to think about your experiences or impressions formally. Once you began to think about these formally, however, it wasn’t so easy to think about your own process of thought simultaneously. To do that, you had to have a perception. But, at the deepest level, perception wasn’t formal. And that meant you couldn’t express what you perceived about your own process of thought formally. To do theory, then, was precisely what made you blind to metatheory. If you wanted to think about your experiences formally, what you had to sacrifice was an awareness of your own thought processes. For other proponents of Romantic theory, its power lay in its capacity to treat our experiences formally or abstractly. And that, in turn, was how you got from theory to metatheory. For Coleridge, however, the capacity of Romantic theory for this sort of abstractness was precisely what led to trouble elsewhere.
But if theory isn’t aware of the process by which it comes to be, we presumably can’t expect it to understand or properly appreciate its role. For that, we need to turn to Aids to Reflection. And so Coleridge considers the different possibilities: explanation, knowledge, or, most interestingly, reflection. His preference for reflection shows that he didn’t believe theory had to lead to knowledge. In that respect, he looks forward to where we now are: to a natural epistemology where we get, at best, explanation but not certainty. Yet the primary role of theory, for Coleridge, was as a means to reflection. Reflection, however, doesn’t necessarily point to a specific end. And clearly Coleridge isn’t really interested in one here. Instead, as elsewhere in his work, he shows himself to be most interested in thinking as an activity. Precisely because he didn’t believe theory could ever be an end in itself, he felt we ought to define theory in terms of its use. For Coleridge, theory doesn’t quite yield what we want, which is a perspective that would make our experiences meaningful. From his standpoint, we only get that by means of reflection, or metatheory. At the same time, theory led to metatheory. Through metatheory, theory appears as a form of human activity, by which we strive to impart coherence to our experiences. By what it seeks to do, then, theory becomes expressive of our spiritual quest.
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