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

Reviews David P. Haney. The Challenge ofColeridge: EthicsandInterpretation in Romanticism andModern Phihsophy. University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press, 200 1 . 309p. Daniel Smitherman University of Montana Contemporary critical theory, in literature as well as philosophy, comments on ethics and history from a variety ofangles and perspectives, both as objects ofthat critical theory as well as tools for the practice of that theory. In recent decades, questions ofliterary interpretation have broadened to issues oftextual and narrative treatment and, by implication, to issues ofthe treatment ofethnic and cultural expression. As such, these have become ethical discussions. David Haney avails himself of the wedding of hermeneutics and ethics, and brings to bear twentieth-century categories and practices on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work in Haney's recent book, The Challenge ofColeridge. At the same time, Haneyfurther articulates and analyzes those very categories and practices in Coleridge's terms—ofpolarity, trinity, unity, poetic faith, imagination, and will, among others. Two of the major figures to represent 20^-CCmUiTy hermeneutics and ethics are Hans-Georg Gadamer and Emmanuel Levinas; minor figures include Paul Ricoeur, Wayne C. Booth, Martha Nussbaum, and Bernard Williams. Haney distinguishes and discusses ethical issues of interpretation on several planes ofliterary critical analysis in general, and the study ofColeridge's work in particular: • Explicit ethical judgments in the work ofColeridge, and the interrogation those judgments experience in light of lO^-century criticism (Chapters 6 and 7). • The reader's/critic's engagementwith and relationship to the text under consideration (Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 7). • The poet's relationship to his own creations (Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6). • The role ofliterary texts in ethical evaluation (Chapter 2 and 5). Haney demonstrates thoroughly that Coleridge's work rewards the hermeneutic /critical scrutiny; but whether or not Coleridge's work also poses an authentic challenge to contemporaryhermeneutics and ethics is arguable. Haneyproposes his intent anyway, in less than challenging words: "I use a reading ofColeridge in dialogue with twentieth-century criticism and philosophy to explore the question of how ethical problems ofhuman interaction are related to the interpretive problems ofhow selves understand the world and each other" (xi). Hardly fightin words. IfHaney's book rewards the reader, I think it will be in affirming, as he claims, the relation between hermeneutics and ethics in general, and between Coleridge SPRING 2002 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * 101 and contemporary critical theory in particular, but that relation is one ofanalogy rather than, for instance, reciprocal influence or challenge. Do we interpretsituations and people and, as a result, interact with them in a characteristic way, becausewe have implicidyor explicidyadopted twentieth-centuryhermeneuticprinciples ? And does reading Coleridge chaüenge this influence, whether by bringing to awareness what was only implicit—and thereby exposing those assumptions to scrutiny—or direcdy questioning what is explicitly employed in the activity of interpretation? I think that in the end, and at the very least, Haney has thoroughly demonstrated in the particulars ofColeridge's work, that, like our interactions with other human beings, our interpretive engagements with texts make ethical claims on us: "The process by which the author is effaced when his or her utterance enters the technology of written reproduction is also the process by which the poetic word, freed from the bonds ofauthorial intention, is presented in its true otherness , such that we can engage it according to the ethical structure ofa conversation with an other" (69). In both encounters is the possibility, the danger, and often the fact, of domination, repression, condescension; both the text and the person become invisible, get trampled on. Levinas' work on subjectivity and Gadamer's work in hermeneutics are effectively discussed in a way that makes a primafacie case for the relevance ofColeridge's own work, poetic and discursive. Arguably, Haney effectively questions the twentieth-century theory in Coleridge's terms, and really puts elements and features ofthat theory into question . Especially in the later chapters, Haney guides the reader through extended discussions of Coleridge's work and thought as such and as a result, Coleridge becomes a substantive voice, a recognizable voice. Unfortunately, in much ofthe earlier chapters, it is contemporary critical theory, only occasionallyfoiled by scattered bits ofColeridge's terminologyand concepts, that overwhelmingly predominates...