The Challenge of Coleridge

Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy

David Haney

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780271020518
• eBook ISBN: 9780271076805
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Interweaving past and present texts, The Challenge of Coleridge engages the British Romantic poet, critic, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a "conversation" (in Hans-Georg Gadamer's sense) with philosophical thinkers today who share his interest in the relationship of interpretation to ethics and whose ideas can be both illuminated and challenged by Coleridge's insights into and struggles with this relationship.

In his philosophy, poetry, theology, and personal life, Coleridge revealed his concern with this issue, as it manifests itself in the relation between technical and ethical discourse, between fact and value, between self and other, and in the ethical function of aesthetic experience and the role of love in interpretation and ethical action.

Relying on Gadamer's hermeneutics to supply a framework for his approach, Haney connects Coleridge's ideas with, among others, Emmanuel Levinas's other-oriented notion of ethical subjectivity, Paul Ricoeur's view about the other's implication in the self, reinterpretations of Greek drama by Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum, and Gianni Vattimo's post-Nietzschean hermeneutics.

Coleridge is treated not as a product of Romantic ideology to be deconstructed from a modern perspective, but as a writer who offers a "challenge" to our modern tendency to compartmentalize interpretive issues as a concern for literary theorists and ethical issues as a concern for philosophers. Looking at the two together, Haney shows through his reading of Coleridge, can enrich our understanding of both.

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Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Historicism

I. Hermeneutics and Ethics

How closely are ethical and hermeneutic issues related? That is to say, to what extent is ethical action or thought dependent on processes of interpretation, and to what extent does interpretation itself have an ethical component? A comprehensive answer is a topic for another book, but some preliminary considerations of what is at stake in such questions will help set the stage for their relevance to Coleridge. The deep connection in Coleridge’s thought between the interpretive activity of self-consciousness and its ethical, ultimately theological underpinnings may justify us in assuming, without much argument, a clear link between ethics and hermeneutics. The many recent explorations of the connections between literature and ethics also assume, by their very existence, that literary criticism in its broad sense can somehow be connected with the ethical, whether by emphasizing the ethics implicit in particular schools of literary criticism, as in Tobin Siebers’s The Ethics of Criticism, by seeing the process of reading deconstructively as an ethical demand, as in J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading, or by finding in literature a source of thick ethical example, as in Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge. It is difficult for most academics to envision an activity that does not involve verbal interpretation, so that ethical action becomes a subset of an even broader range of interpretively conditioned action. Although Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Contingencies of Value is about interpretive processes of “evaluation” that occupy an area both inside and outside of what most people would call the ethical, she succinctly emphasizes the ubiquity of interpretive evaluation: “for a responsive creature, to exist is to evaluate” (42).

While this close connection between interpretation and ethical activity may be a given for both Coleridge and his interpreters, it is not a necessary connection. To assume too close a link between interpretive, reflexive activity and ethics might lead to the conclusion that the best interpreters are the most ethical people, a conclusion that is not only contrary to experience, but also suspiciously self-serving, if this conclusion comes from an academic who is in the business of interpreting. Charles Altieri, whose work is probably the most ambitious attempt in recent years to find a meeting ground for aesthetics and ethics, is suspicious in this way of both Charles Taylor and Stanley Cavell. Cavell, he says, idealizes philosophy by treating the philosopher, whose main activity is verbal articulation, as the “representative person” (Subjective Agency 201). Altieri comments, making an important distinction, that “most people, I suspect, do not, and need not, try to own their lives in the way intellectuals do, that is, by elaborating verbal equivalents for them. Agents live by meanings, but not all agents determine meanings by writing (literally or figuratively)” (202). If “writing” in Altieri’s broad sense is close to “interpretation,” this comment suggests that the “meanings” essential to the ownership of one’s life and the possibility of ethical action are not necessarily articulate meanings worked out in a hermeneutic process. To use a loose version of Altieri’s Wittgensteinian terminology, we can operate in and construct a perfectly meaningful ethical world by participating in language games that do not necessarily require us to isolate “meaning” in the narrow sense of a concept reached through a process of interpretation. Along the same lines, though with a very different emphasis, Charles Taylor notes that the moral frameworks within which ethical action occurs are, more often than not, inarticulate, but not therefore less important. Restricting ethical terms to “reasons” leads to the “strange cramped theories of modern moral philosophy” limited by procedural reason (Sources of the Self 89) and unable to talk about substantial moral goods that do not fit into the context of such reason. Ethical terms such as “brutality” and “courage” can be “indispensable” to the “non-explanatory contexts of living” (58); we necessarily have recourse to strong ethical terms as we live our life whether or not we use those terms in the context of an interpretive discourse that gives reasons for actions. Ethical action is closely related to the meanings we give life, or, more simply, to the ethically-laden terms we use, but that meaning may or may not be an articulated object of a process of interpretation.

This distinction between ethical meaningfulness and hermeneutic meaning is not a distinction between the inarticulate or articulate status of the same meaning, as if ethical meaningfulness were like a repressed memory recoverable in analysis. For example, someone might save me from an attacker, exclaiming, “I’ve got to show some courage and rescue this guy from such brutality.” This is clearly an example of meanings being attached to “courage” and “brutality” and being used in ethical action. The philosopher or critic who analyzes “courage” and “brutality” in terms of reasons for actions is not necessarily unpacking meanings that were simply latent in my rescuer’s use of the words, but rather is using those words in an entirely different way. The philosopher or critic uses them within a language game in which words describe concepts, while my rescuer used those same words in a language game in which words are part of an immediate responsiveness to a situation. Meaning, and coherent systems of meaning, are present in both cases, but the meaning in the case of the philosopher or critic is a product of the process of interpretation, with its articulation of reasons, while (luckily for me) the meaning in the case of my rescuer resides in a set of attitudes about brutality and courage that are part of his or her immediate responsiveness to a situation. Obviously, the same person can use meaning in both ways; my rescuer might in fact be a philosopher who, one hopes, will not act like one in this situation.

If it is a mistake to see ethical life as dependent on interpretive processes, it is even more clearly a mistake to see interpretive activity as fundamentally ethical. Hans-Georg Gadamer argues, in response to Derrida’s accusation that his hermeneutics depends on the Kantian concept of “good will,” that hermeneutic understanding is ethically neutral. It has “nothing to do with ethics” because “[e]ven immoral beings try to understand one another” (“Reply to Jacques Derrida” 55). As we shall see below, Gadamer’s own position is not as clear-cut as this suggests, because his own theories of interpretation draw heavily on ethical concepts, but it is important to remember that there is nothing necessarily ethical about interpretive processes, particularly those employed in literary criticism. Even if, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues, our interpretive existence in a relativistic world forces us to “evaluate” constantly, evaluation (as she is quick to point out [161–62]) is not necessarily ethical, nor does it necessarily lead to ethical positions. We can evaluate a situation in terms of its agreeableness, its shock value, its humor, or its ethical force, and a premeditated murder is heinous precisely because it follows a process of interpretation/evaluation.

The notion that interpretation may or may not be ethical is important to remember when considering the paradoxes of the current ideologically-charged critical climate. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham points out in his brief summary of the fate of ethics in recent theory, ethics has been seen as complicit with everything that literary theory has attempted to “subvert,” from logocentrism to autonomous selfhood to totalitarianism to gender bias (“Ethics” 387–89). However, ethics is in this scenario a repressed that inevitably returns in the wake of the 1987 exposure of Paul de Man’s pro-Nazi wartime journalism, at which point polite discussions of language “gave way to charges of personal immorality, collaboration in the Holocaust, opportunism, and deception” (389). But we do not need Harpham’s Freudian concept of repression to explain this turn, because the revolutionary rhetoric of theory from Derrida (whose links to the ethics of Levinas and the political turmoil of the 1960s in France were lost in his early reception in the United States) to current developments in cultural studies commits itself to an easily romanticized binary ethics. Altieri describes this ethics in his characterization of cultural studies as caught in “a single grounding binary opposition between the symbolic order, linked with paternal power or dominant ideologies, and a locus of possible value in a radical other of representation all too easy to romanticize” (Subjective Agency 65–66). If everything one does is ideologically determined, then interpretation will always fall on the “good” or “bad” side of this ethical binary. According to this logic, by a strange twist, all writing becomes autobiographical, and de Man’s formerly subversive deconstruction is itself deconstructed and revealed as the expression of totalitarianism.

The error in this kind of thinking is not that the accusations against de Man’s character are unfair, but that this argument leaves no room for the fact that acts of interpretation may be ethical or not, and that not every ethical act of criticism carries the same ethical force. Both the extreme of turning de Man’s overall critical project into a moral tale, such as “the triumph of falling” that Tobin Siebers finds (98–123), and the opposite extreme of taking at face value de Man’s own objections to ethics as merely “a discursive mode among others” (qtd. “Ethics” 389) prevent any discrimination between acts of interpretation that do carry an ethical weight and those that do not, as well as among the kinds and intensities of ethical force in the first category. The lesson here is that it is important to explore this problematic relationship between ethics and interpretation while avoiding the temptation either to align them too closely or to separate them too distinctly. The fact that ethics and hermeneutics are so clearly interconnected while at the same so clearly incommensurable is exactly what makes this topic important.

As Altieri points out, even if interpretation does not cover the entire field of ethical action, such reflexive second-order thought plays an important role in the articulation of ethical responsibility. He cites the example of Mother Theresa, whose “constant acts of charity are not instances of ethical thinking” because they are “more deeply rooted in responsiveness to others than strictly ethical thinking can generate or account for.” Ethical reflection would enter the picture only if Mother Theresa were called on to justify her actions: “Then she must engage a discourse about responsibility and justification, and then we have a clear instance of ethical reflection” (Subjective Agency 154).

Altieri chooses to restrict his discussion to this second-order realm of responsibility, because it allows him to illuminate the expressive agent’s appeals to grammars of responsibility, while at the same time enabling him to evade the discussion of “the good” that he finds so problematic in philosophers such as Taylor. My topic will not allow me to be so strategic: the relation between hermeneutics and ethics in Coleridge will not allow an exclusionary relationship between prereflective direct responsiveness and reflexive “ethical” responsibility. As I will try to show with reference to some links between Coleridge and Emmanuel Levinas, the ethical is deeply imbedded in interpretive processes, but the ethical also stands as a limit to such processes, precisely because those prereflective hypergoods, which Altieri’s reflective expressivism hopes to avoid, are in some ways unavoidable, if only in the form of the basic assumptions about human nature that underlie any ethical theory.

Within the realm of reflective thought (as opposed to direct responsiveness) an important link between hermeneutics and ethics can be found in the ethical implications of the “hermeneutic circle,” the interpretive concept that Maurizio Ferraris traces back to Flacius Illyricus in the sixteenth century, according to which the parts of a text can be understood only in the context of an evolving foreknowledge of the whole (30–31). Drawing on Heidegger’s version of the circle, Gadamer explains it as follows: “A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text. Again, the initial meaning emerges only because he is reading the text with particular expectations in regard to a certain meaning. Working out this fore-projection, which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is understanding what is there” (TM 267). Quoting Heidegger, Gadamer stresses that this is not a “vicious” circle from which one would wish to escape, but rather a description, with “an ontologically positive significance,” of the way understanding works (266). Gadamer sees a similar process in Aristotle’s ethical concept of phronesis (to be treated in more detail in the next chapter), which addresses the interdependence between general ethical principles and their application to particular situations. P. Christopher Smith, who has translated Gadamer’s major treatises on ethics and written extensively on the ethical implications of Gadamer’s thought, summarizes this ethical/hermeneutic circularity with remarkable precision: “One chooses on the basis of what one ‘always already’ knows to be right, though this knowledge remains indeterminate until one has made a choice that concretizes it” (204). Smith argues persuasively that this notion provides an important mediation between, on one hand, ethical philosophies that argue from abstract principles such as rational rules, individual rights, and even doctrinaire pragmatism, and on the other hand, those that would retreat to a Nietzschean unmasking of such principles as merely the expressions of personal or class-based preferences. Coleridge, who like Gadamer is deeply rooted in both the Protestant tradition of biblical hermeneutics and the German Idealist tradition, sees the circle in theological terms with clear ethical implications: “In order to an efficient belief in Christianity, a man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths” (BL 2: 244). The foreunderstanding that comes from one’s practice of faith and involvement in the historical tradition of Christianity is necessary to the concretization of “spiritual Truths.”

As this circularity suggests, ethical understanding is difficult because it must both depend on and differentiate itself from the particularity of concrete ethical decisions. “If man always encounters the good in the form of the particular situation in which he finds himself,” says Gadamer in his discussion of Aristotle in Truth and Method, then “the task of moral knowledge is to determine what the concrete situation asks of him” (313). Gadamer’s careful wording here, which grants authority both to a general concept of “the good” and to the particular situation, suggests the methodological difficulty in determining the appropriate role of philosophical ethics in relation to actual ethical decisions. According to Gadamer, philosophical ethics should not be so tied to the particularity of the individual moral action that it “usurp[s] the place of moral consciousness,” but neither should it be so distanced from concrete application that it “seek[s] a purely theoretical and ‘historical’ knowledge.” Rather, it should help “moral consciousness to attain clarity concerning itself” by “outlining phenomena” (TM 313). In ethics, this means that one must already have a moral consciousness: “through education and practice he must himself already have developed a demeanor that he is constantly concerned to preserve in the concrete situations of his life and prove through right behavior” (313). Similarly in the hermeneutic situation, where “meaning” is always encountered as particular manifestations of meaning, the hermeneutic endeavor can not identify with the text completely as if one could interpret without bringing presuppositions to bear, but neither can it provide a purely theoretical or historical account to be applied to the text after the fact. As Gadamer says with reference to Bultman, “[A]ll understanding presumes a living relationship between the interpreter and the text,” a requirement for “fore-understanding” (331).

These hermeneutically paradigmatic theological and Aristotelian contexts, to which Gadamer often returns, suggest the deep intertwining of ethical and hermeneutic issues, particularly when we consider an author such as Coleridge, who promoted the constant interpenetration of theology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and even literary criticism. Gadamer also links ethics and hermeneutics in terms of the relationship between rhetorical understanding and practical philosophy in Aristotle. “[T]he Greek word for the act of understanding and for being habitually understanding toward others, synesis,” moves from an ethically neutral word to “a kind of intellectual virtue” in Aristotle’s practical philosophy: “‘[b]eing habitually understanding toward others’ means a modification of practical reasonableness, the insightful judgment regarding someone else’s practical deliberations,” and thus implies “much more than a mere understanding of what was said,” because it “entails a kind of communality” (Reason in the Age of Science 132–33).¹

Even though understanding is desired by both the moral and the immoral, there does seem to be an unavoidable ethical element in the hermeneutic act: a demand for a certain generosity toward the other and for the recognition of, in terms of Gadamer’s Aristotle, “a kind of communality in virtue of which reciprocal taking of counsel, the giving and taking of advice, is at all meaningful in the first place” (Reason in the Age of Science 133).² While the content of that “advice” can be moral, immoral, or neither (it could be advice on doing good deeds, robbing a bank, or repairing a car), the context requires a kind of ethical attitude: even evildoers must listen to each other generously if they are to work together. Thus, even before we consider arguments such Tobin Siebers’s, that literary-critical positions imply ethical presuppositions, or J. Hillis Miller’s, that there is an ethical imperative to read deconstructively, any act of interpretation necessarily engages the ethical sphere in some way merely by virtue of its status as an interpersonal exchange. This is not to say that every act of interpretation can be given a particular ethical content, but it is to say that it is as important to see the connections between interpretation and ethical thought as it is to recognize their differences.

II. The Romantics and Us: Problems of Historicizing

These uneasy connections between hermeneutics and ethics are complicated by the problems of historical interpretation. Just as the contemporary reduction of history to ideology totalizes the ethical field by seeing history as a binary struggle between good and bad forces, so too it totalizes the interpretive field by ignoring or merely paying lip service to many of the problems of historical interpretation. To use some Gadamerian language that will be clarified as this study progresses, the “challenge of Coleridge” is first and foremost to read him with an attentiveness both to his horizon and to our own that will enable his texts to “speak” to us in a way that can produce insights into issues of common concern to the Romantics and to us. This kind of approach demands that we eschew the polarities of agreement or critique that have characterized recent Romantic studies. In the politically charged atmosphere of recent literary criticism, studies of Coleridge, particularly when they focus on his movement toward a Trinitarian theological position, tend either to accept his position as coherent and valuable, as in Ronald C. Wendling...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Historicism
• 2. Ethics and Art: Problems of Phronesis and Techne
• 3. Knowledge, Being, and Hermeneutics
• 4. Is and Ought in Literature and Life
• 5. Literary Criticism and Moral Philosophy
• 6. Oneself as Another: Coleridgean Subjectivity
• 7. Love, Otherness, and the Absolute Self
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index