Coleridge and German romantic aesthetic : the influence of Kant's critique of judgement
著者（英） Kuri Katsuyama
journal or
publication title
Doshisha literature
number 38
page range 1‑14
year 1995‑03‑10
権利（英） English Literary Society of Doshisha University
URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000014783
COLERIDGE AND GERMAN ROMANTIC AESTHETIC:
THE INFLUENCE OF KANT'S
CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT
KURI KA TSUYAMA
Since the 17th century of Descartes, the central issue of Western philosophy has been the relationship between the self and Nature, the subject and the object. While Fichte and Berkeley emphasize the inner quality and activities of the self, Hobbes, Locke and Hartley emphasize nature's functions affecting human minds. Leibniz, Kant, Shelling, Hume and so forth connect these two extremes. These two basic positions have produced such coupling of terms as materialism or naturalism and supernaturalism, the object and the subject, "Es gibt" and "lch bin." The debates on these issues were discussed with applause and criticism by the 1790's, especially in Germany.
It is evident through Coleridge's writings that the philosophical currents of Germany had great influence on him. Kant and Shelling, who tried connecting the two extremes, the self and nature, the subject and the object, are specially important figures for Coleridge. Among Kant's works, his Critique of Judgement must have given profound impressions on Coleridge.
Kant analyzes there "the beautiful" and "the sublime" as a conjoining point of the subject and the object. In this paper I shall focus on "the sublime" as analyzed in Critique of Judgement and shall clarify this connection with Coleridge. I shall also reconsider what significance the aesthetics of Kant and Coleridge have as Romantic ideologies in late 18th century Germany and England, reflecting the latest Terry Eagleton criticism, The Ideology of the Aesthetic.
Coleridge represents a beautiful image of unification between the subject (1)
and the obj~ct:
I have read of two rivers passing through the same lake, yet all the way preserving their streams visibly distinct-if I mistake not, the Rhone and the Adar, through the Lake of Geneva. In a far finer distinction, yet in a subtler union ... are the streams of knowing and being. The lake is formed by the two streams in man and nature as it exists in and for man;
and up this lake the philosopher sails on the junction-line of the constituent streams.1
The lake formed by the "two streams of knowing and being" is an extremely beautiful image of unification of the subject and the object. Here is also clearly expressed the philosopher's goal to achieve, that is, to sail "up this lake" "on the junction-line of the constituent streams" of the subject and the object. Kant is one of the philosophers who sailed up this lake before Coleridge.
In Biographia Literaria Coleridge describes how greatly he was influenced by Kant:
The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance, of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic; and I will venture to add (paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of IMMANUEL KANT, from Reviewers and Frenchmen) the clearness and evidence, of the
"CRITIQUE OF THE PURE REASON;" of the JUDG~MENT; of the
"METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY,"
and of his "RELIGION WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF PURE REASON," took possesion of me with a giant's hand. After fifteen years familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration.2
Kant analyzes nature (the object) in Critique of the Pure Reason and morality (the subject) in Critique of the Practical Reason and clarifies the interaction between these two worlds in "the beautiful" and "the sublime" in Critique of
Judgement. Coleridge admires Kanfs philosophy and his logic the most of all other English contemporaries and his zeal for devouring Kanfs productions lasts throughout his life. Henry Crabb Robinson quotes that Coleridge considers Kanfs Kritik der Urtheilskraft (Critique of Judgement) "the most astonishing of Kanfs works."3
The world of nature and the world of morality, i.e., freedom, are not quite independent for Kant. These two worlds, the sensible realm and the supersensible one, must be interrelated so that moral freedom could be realized. Kant says in his introduction to Critique of Judgement:
Now even if an immeasurable gulf is fixed between the sensible realm of the concept of nature and the supersensible realm of the concept of freedom, so that no transition is possible from the first to the second (by means of the theoretical use of reason), just as if they were two different worlds of which the first could have no influence upon the second, yet the second is meant to have an influence upon the first. ... There must, therefore, be a ground of the unity of the supersensible. which lies at the basis of nature, with that which the concept of freedom practically contains; arid the concept of this ground, although it does not attain either theoretically or practically to a knowledge of the same, and hence has no peculiar mode of thought according to the principles of the one to that according to the principles of the other.4
The realm of nature must be harmonized with the realm of freedom and be adapted to it according to the laws of freedom, or these two worlds have no relation each other and moral freedom could never be possible. This ground of the unity of the sensible and the supersensible is judgement, in which the concept of freedom is meant to actualize in the world of sense the purpose proposed by its laws and the realm of nature is harmonized with that purpose.
Kant finds in the beautiful and the sublime this purpose proposed by the laws of freedom.
Kant analyzes the beautiful first and says that the judgement of taste is
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aesthetical.
In order to distinguish whether anything is beautiful or not, we refer the presentation, not by the understanding to the object for cognition, but by the imagination (perhaps in conjunction with the understanding) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or pain. The judgement of taste is therefore not a judgement of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical ... (ch. 1, p. 37)
Kant says that "the beautiful seems to be regarded as the presentation of ~n
indefinite concept of understanding, the sublime as that of a like concept of reason" (ch. 23, p. 82). Coleridge.'s theories of Understanding and Reason seem to be greatly influenced by Kant. The imagination, according to Kant, gathers together the manifold of intuition, and works with the understanding at the time of our feeling the beautiful. Kanfs analysis of the harmonized workings of the imagination and the understanding in CJ seems to be one of the important sources of Coleride's theory of the imagination. \
Different from the feeling of the beautiful, the feeling of the sublime is incompatible with physical charm and the mind is not merely attracted by the object but sometimes repelled. The satisfaction in the beautiful comes from a feeling of the furtherance of life, while that in the sublime does not so much involve a positive pleasure, but rather a negative pleasure. Kant further analyzes the sublime in contrast to the beautiful:
The beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having (definite) boundaries. The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought ... (ch. 23, p. 82)
This description of the sublime which is "to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness is represented ... "
5 corresponds with the expression of the poet's feeling that is aroused just in front of Mount Blanc in Coleridge's "Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni." The pleasure experienced here by the poet "arises only in directly" and "is produced by the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital powers and consequent stronger outflow of them"(ch. 23, p. 83) This . poem must be one of the most excellent of the poetic expressions of the
sublime as analyzed by Kant.
o
dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced 1ll prayer I worshipped the invisible alone.Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody, So sweet, we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my
Thought, Yea, with my Life and Life's own secret JOY:
Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused, Into the mighty vision passing-there
As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven!5
The views of the mountain, which "swelled vast to Heaven" from the earth, sticking out of the clouds and causing awe and respect, and of the stream flowing with lasting thunder and splash, bring the poet, as the everlasting existences beyond time and space, the overflowing joy blending with his thoughts and life. Nature which makes us feel eternity beyond time and space inspires the poet's soul and expands it to the height of Heaven, blending with the figure of the mountain "swelled vast to Heaven." Here is beautifully expressed the image of the subject and the object which are blended together and expanded to Heaven. The poet "gazed upon" the "dread and silent Mount," which is sensed as "a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of
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it boundlessness is represented." The poet gazed upon it, till it, "still present to the bodily sense," i.e., still "its totality is also present to thought," "didst vanish from my thought." "Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody,! So sweet, we know not we are listening to it,! Thou the meanwhile, wast blending with my Thought,! Yea with my Life and Life's own secret joy."
The poet's pleasure here "arises only indirectly; it is produced by the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital power." And "the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused,! Into the mighty vision passing-there/ As in her natural form, swelled vast to HeavenJ" These expressions exactly correspond to Kant's definition of the feeling of the sublime and its pleasure: the feeling of
"consequent stronger outflow of them [the vital powers]" (ch. 23, p. 83). The poet persistently expresses the feeling of stronger outflow of the vital powers in the lines following the former quotation of "Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni," where the poet calls his own soul and heart to be awake and calls the several aspects of the sublime in nature with the notes of exclamation.
This exhilaration of the poet's soul comes to be more interesting when it is considered with Kanfs following explanation of the sublime:
... the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it IS,
provided only that we are in security; and we willingly call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness. (ch. 28, p. 101)
The poet is at the foot of Mont Blanc, down the side of which "five conspicuous torrents rush" and "within a few paces of the Glaciers, the Gentiana Major grows in immense numbers, with its 'flowers of loveliest blue.",6 The attraction and awfulness of "sovran Blanc" still more increases when the poet is in security, which is symbolized by "the Gentiana Major"
with "its flowers of loveliest blue." This security against nature, in which the poet is now, was felt first in a historical and social sense after the late 18th century through the Industrial Revolution in England. The sublimity of the Mount felt by the poet seems to be more understandable, especially when it is viewed in conjunction with Kant's analysis of the sublime.
The ground for such exhilaration in the sublime is analyzed as still more contrasting to that for the beautiful:
We must seek a ground external to ourselves for the beautiful of nature, but seek it for the sublime merely in ourselves and in our attitude of thought, which introduces sublimity into the representation of nature.
(ch. 23, p. 84)
The experience of the sublime raises man's soul to the everlasting, blending with the scenery seemingly expanding beyond time and space. The true ground for this sublimity is in our own inner voice. The scenery expanding beyond time and space itself is the one in which the endless expasion of the individual inner soul is projected. Kant further explains the situation in which we feel the sublime in nature and says;
... Therefore nature is here called sublime m'1rely because it elevates the imagination to a presentation of those cases in which the mind can make felt the proper sublimity of its destination, in comparison with nature itself. (ch. 28, p. 101)
In "Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my I Thought, I Yea, with my Life and Life's own secret joy; I Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused, I Into the mighty vision passing-there I As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven," Coleridge exactly symbolizes and dramatizes Kanfs idea of the sublime. It is the imagination for both Kant and Coleridge that can expand the individual inner soul and project it in nature.
Kant says of the imagination in CJ that when we feel the sublimity: "The
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transcendent (toward which the imagination is impelled in its apprehension of intuition) is for the imagination like an abyss in which it fears to lose itself ... " (ch. 27, p. 97). The "most awful Form" (1. 5) of the Mount, "those precipitous, black, jagged rocks" (1. 43) and the "unceasing thunder and eternal foam" (1. 47) of "wild torrents" (1. 40) are the aspects of nature like an abyss in which the imagination fears to lose itself. Even if we try to grasp these sights as a certain unified figure, they never allow us to do so. Men feel the sublimity in these cases. It is never compatible with (physical) charms and never brings a feeling of the furtherance of life. It rather momentarily checks life and its vital power. There, we cannot but feel the impotence of our existence. Through the feeling of our impotence in our senses, however, we know that there is transcendental reason in us. We meet such reason which expands beyond our senses when we confront huge nature. As a consequence, we feel the stronger outflow of life and its vital powers.
Kant says:
... the feeling of the sublime may appear ... to violate purpose in respect of the judgement, to be unsuited to our presentative faculty, and as it were to do violence to the imagination; and yet it is judged to be only the more sublime. (ch. 23, p. 83)
When the sights which seem to be out of our senses and violate the workings of the imagination allow us to feel the supersensible power of reason, we feel the sublime. The sights which seem to violate purpose in respect of judgement still more stimulate us to feel the existence of reason and to adjust to the workings of reason, i.e., morality. Kant says further; " ... there accompanies the reception of an object as sublime a pleasure, which is only possible through the medium of pain" (ch. 28, p. 99).
These expressions of the interaction between the imagination and the sublime must have had great influence on Coleridge. As for Coleridge's
theory of the imagination itself, it is significant to note that besides Kant, Shelling, Gerard and Teten pychologically gave depth to Coleridge's theory.
Coleridge comes to emphasize the more dynamic, multiple and expansive imagination, where the subject and the object seem to work organically together, affect each other and transform to the more expanded system.
Coleridge grasps the working of the imagination more positively and dynamically and defines the secondary imagination: "It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and unify."7 Here we recognize
"the medium of pain" and the "violence" resorted to the imagination which
"dissolves, diffuses, dissipates" and "struggles to idealize and unify." These images of pain and violence are clearly coincident with the ones used by Kant to define the working of the imagination when we feel the sublime. And the words, "re-create," "idealize" and "unify," signify the existence of the purpose proposed in nature which is underlined by Kant. Coleridge, however, still more emphasizes the positive side of the workings of the imagination as a dymamic, multiple and expansive power. Then what do we attain through the experience of the sublime? And what does the imagination idealize and unify?
Kant describes the sublimity of religion and insists that we reach to "the sublimity of that Being" through the experience of the sublime:
Sublimity, therefore, does not reside in anything of nature, but only in our mind ... Everything that excites this feeling in us, e.g. the might of nature which calls forth our forces, is called then ... sublime. Only by supposing this idea in ourselves and in reference to it are we capable of attaining to the idea of the sublimity of that Being which produces respect in us, not merely by the might that it displays in nature, but rather by means of the faculty which resides in us of judging it fearlessly and of regarding our destination as sublime in respect of it. (ch. 28, p.
104)
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Only when we recognize the essence of sublimity which exists in our mind, we are capable of attaining to the idea of the sublimity of that Being which allows us to know the supersensible reason within us, i.e., morality, which is, for Kant, a constant exertion of one's power and good will. Coleridge expresses "the necessity of that one great Being" in the same way as follows:
... the mind ... looking abroad into nature finds that in its own nature it has been fathoming nature, and that nature itself is but the greater mirror in which he beholds his own present and his own past being in the law, and learns to reverence while he feels the necessity of that one great Being whose external reason is the ground and absolute cause of all the correspondent realities in nature-the reality of nature forever consist- ing in the law by which each thing is that which it is8
The point that Kant and Coleridge reach to through the experience of the sublime and the dynamic imagination is "the sublimity of that Being " and
"the necessity of that one great Being." The Ancient Mariner's voyage and his endless travel to confess his awful experience seem to be an excellent poetic expression of the sublime, with its praise of the sea snakes being climactic, in which he attains his faith in "that one great Being."
I have described the connection between Kant and Coleridge centering on the sublime. Then what meaning does their aesthetics have as the ideologies in the Romantic period of late 18th century Germany and England? Terry Eagleton analyzes Kant's aesthetic in The Ideology
0/
the Aesthetic:When, for Kant, we find ourselves concurring spontaneously in an aesthetic judgement, able to agree that a certain phenomenon is sublime or beautiful, we exercise a precious form of intersubjectivity, estab- lishing ourselves as a community of feeling subjects linked by a quick sense of our shared capacities9
Eagleton insists that Kant sets the ground of our feeling sublimity within us, by which we are capable of attaining a very convenient and precious form of
intersubjectivity in the name of an aesthetic judgement. Eagleton also defines aesthetics in the social and historical context:
The aesthetic is thus the wan hope, in an increasingly rationalized, secularized, demythologized environment, that ultimate purpose and meaning may not be entirely lost ... it is as though the aesthetic represents some residual feeling left over from an earlier social order, where a sence of transcendental meaning and harmony, and of the centrality of the human subject, were still active. (p. 88)
When the world was irresistibly rationalized, secularlized and demytholo- gized in 18th century Europe, only the aesthetic could give the human subject its autonomy. Only through the aesthetic, could man retain a sense of harmony and unity with a transcendental existence, Being.
Eagleton explains the ideological characteristics of the aesthetics and continues:
Part of what we enjoy in the aesthetic ... is the knowledge that our very structural constitution as human subjects predisposes us to mutual harmony. It it as though, prior to any determinate dialogue or debate, we are always already in agreementJashionedto concur; and the aesthetic is this experience of pure contentless consensus where we find ourselves spontaneously at one without necessarily even knowing what, referen- tially speaking, we are agreeing over. (p. 96)
Eagleton persistently stresses the dangerous aspect of the aesthetic, because it never allows any debate nor questioning. It presupposes a mutual harmony at the basis of our sensibility. And further he characterizes the ironical aspect of the aesthetic:
Aesthetic intersubjectivity adumbrates a utopian community of sub- iects, united in the very deep structure of their being .... The cultural domain ... is one of non-coercive consensus; it is of the essence of aesthetic judgements that they cannot be compelled. 'Culture' thus
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promotes an inward, unconstrained unity between citizens on the basis . of their most intimate subjectivity ... If culture thus sketches the ghostly outline of a non-dominative social order, it does so by mystifying and legitimating actual dominative social relations. (p. 97) Although. we try to deny and reject the existing social order and try to find a unity and mutual harmony in the aesthetic, this aesthetic itself mystifies and legitimates actual dominative social relations. Thus Eagleton, as a Marxist critic, puts emphasis on the social and economical relations ruling people and focuses on the ironical aspect of the Romantic aesthetics. In order to clarify this, the social and historical contexts in middle- and late-18th century Germany and Britain have to be explained.
Prussia in the 18th century was a provincial territory of feudal-absolutist states ruled by aristocrats who enjoyed fast living. The peasantry was wretchedly exploited and forced to languishe in poverty. The bourgeoisie was alienated from the degraded masses in the parochial social order and guild-dominated towns, being short of capital, enterprise and communica- tions and lacking a general culture. The socially backward conditions forced the thinking of the 18th century German middle class to be extremely idealistic. From the depths of an ignorant and late feudal autocracy, came a vision of a universal order of a free, equal, autonomous human subject who does not obey any laws but those he gave to himself.
While the German middle class languished under the benighted feudalab- solutism, the English landowning elite had already laid the foundation of capitalism and had been accustomed to wage labour and commodity production from the early 16th century. For further capitalist development and a stable political framework to safegard it, the English mercantile class was able to found the Bank of England and secure the predominance of Parliament in the late 17th century. Under these advantageous conditions, Britain was able to emerge as the world's leading commercial power in the
18th century, expanding its imperial sway across the globe. In 18th century Britain, there was a strong, well-founded unity of agrarian and mercantile interests between new and traditional elites, the middle class and the English patriciate. The marketing economy and possessive individualism potentially estranged individuals from human bondage, isolated them and forced them to be at enmity with each other. The dominative social blocks, the nobility and the middle class, expanded their powers not in the name of reality, social class and economic interests, but of aestheti"cs, culture and civility.
Kant denied the late 18th-century Prussia's feudal-absolutism, and Coleridge denied the human alienation and isolation under late 18th-century English commercialism and rationalism. Both of them tried to accomplish a deep political liberation through the aesthetics and the imagination, dynamically unifying the subject and the object, freedom and sympathy.
However, at the same time, they cut off the real society which they tried to deny and oppose, and deepened the subjective inner and searched for a unity and harmony there, so that they cultivated ironically the preconditions to promote the real social order.
The Romantic aesthetics which Kant and Coleridge celebrated embraced the irony and was taken into the real society. It mystified and reproduced the social order that they tried to deny and oppose. Kant and Coleridge, who sang human dignity, freedom, harmony and faith, were both offspring of their age and society in the sense that they were born in their age and breathed the air of that age and were taken into it.
NOTES
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk (1884), p. 70; Anima Poetae, (1895), pp.
261-2.
2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell (New Jersey:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1983) 1, ch. 9, p. 153.
14
3 "C at one point (1S10) is quoted by HCR (Henry Crabb Robinson) as considering Kant's Kritik der Urtheilskraft'the most astonishing of Kant's works.' CRD (Diary, ·Reminiscence, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson) I 305." EL, I. ch. 9, p. 153n.
4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), p. 12. All quotations from Kant are from this edition and will be sited in the text hereafter.
5 "Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni," 11. 13-24, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London & Princeton, N.]., 1969-)
6 The preface of "Hymn Before Sun-rise in the Vale of Chamouni." Quotations from this poem will hereafter be sited in the text by line number.
7 EL, I, ch. 13, p. 304. As for Coleridge's secondary Imagination, Thomas Mcfarland precisely investigates in The Origin and Significance of Coleridge's Theory of Secondary Imagination and James Engell thoroughly develops the theory of Romantic Imagination, including Coleridge's, in The Creative Imagination.
S Coleridge, Philosophical Lectures, pp. 333-4.
9 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford & Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 75. All quotations from this book will hereafter be sited in the text by page number.
