Art has been variously conceived as entirely self-justifying, as a tool for the cultivation of a more refined sensibility, as a source of specific truths leading to greater insight or ethical standards, and as pure pleasure, either through the contemplation of aesthetic forms or through the experience of emotion. Coleridge in his essay “On Poesy or Art” proposes several of these possibilities, but then proceeds to outline a dialectic view of art’s potential that goes beyond art for art’s sake, delight, and instruction, which aims in fact at nothing less than enlightenment. [1] His theory, while striking, is muddled, in particular by the intrusion of religious doctrines suggested not by his topic but by the norms of his day.
Coleridge uses the term “poesy” to refer to all the arts, not just verse or literature. Without considering the complicating cases of music or the abstract elements of plastic art, he accepts, though only as a starting point, the traditional definition of art as imitation. For him no simple imitation, regardless of how perfect it might be, could suffice for art. In fact he concludes that the failures of imitation are in a sense more significant than its successes.
A pure mimesis in Coleridge’s terminology, adapted most directly from Spinoza, [2] would be natura naturata, “nature natured,” the creation considered as a passive finished product. He contrasts this inferior product to true art, natura naturans, “nature naturing.” This expression well summarizes Coleridge’s view of the role of art, but his usage allows no simple paraphrase.
Art for him “is the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man” since it “humanizes” nature “infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything.” “It avails itself of the forms of nature to recall, to express, and to modify the thoughts and feelings of the mind.” What is added, then, to nature itself is the maker’s affect and inferences so that the art object registers not the external in itself, but always refracted through the consciousness of the poet or painter. As “Frost at Midnight” makes clear, nature is for Coleridge altogether passive in this communion with the individual. [3]
Yet the artist does not merely represent the data of the world as lived experience, inspirited by human desire and intuition. The chaos of sense data is ordered to be beautiful and, as the cosmos becomes more patterned, significant, and intelligible, beauty, value, truth, and meaning arise. “While it recalls the sights and sounds that had accompanied the occasions of the original passions, poetry impregnates them with an interest not their own by means of the passions, and yet tempers the passion by the calming power which all distinct images exert on the human soul.”
The relation was sufficiently distinctive for Coleridge to generate the neologism eisemplasy (or esemplasy) and to revive the rare coadunation. [4] Throughout the essay the point is repeated in various forms. Art “is the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man.” “In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the internal.” “This unity in multeity I have elsewhere stated as the principle of beauty.” “The mystery of genius in the fine arts” is “to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature.”
Since the two individuals, the creator and the consumer of art actively seek to make sense of the phenomenological world, while they employ images recorded by their perception, which provide the raw material and the occasion for their, still their conclusions are their own. Preferring a divine origin for his impressions, Wordsworth had maintained in “Intimations of Immortality” following older Platonic and neo-Platonic writers, that one’s highest wisdom, one’s connection to the cosmos, is originally inborn. Coleridge maintains the same access to a prenatal Truth for his own insights. “I seem rather to be seeking, as it were, asking, a symbolical language for something within me, that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.” [5] The use of the word “asking” reveals the author’s awareness that this inborn wisdom of surpassing importance is based on his desire rather than any evidence.
That “something within” is neither more nor less than the mystical correspondence, amounting almost to identity, between inner and outer, idem et alter, psyche and world, mortal and divine. Pursuit of that goal requires that the passions, rather than being suppressed, be cultivated. Only through the individual consciousness can the greater be accessed. Rather than striving to reproduce a second-rate reality (as Plato had it) the artist in fact delineates the gap or difference between what one might very nearly call the atman and the Atman. Paradoxically, according to Coleridge’s schema, it is by spotlighting the very limitations of humanity’s perceptive organs and the insufficiency of the mind as it tries to grasp the nut of reality that the individual may solve the dilemma of dualities and mend the divided consciousness.
The element of order may be clear in the aesthetic object, while the events of everyday life may seem to proceed chaotically or randomly. Art makes the order of the cosmos perceptible. “Hence nature itself would give us the impression of a work of art, if we could see the thought which is present at once in the whole and in every part; and a work of art will be just in proportion as it adequately conveys the thought, and rich in proportion to the variety of parts which it holds in unity.” [6]
Art operates, then, through difference and dialectic, playing what is seen without against what is felt within. “Philosophically we understand that in all imitation two elements must coexist, and not only coexist, but must be perceived as coexisting. These two constituent elements are likeness and unlikeness, or sameness and difference, and in all genuine creations of art there must be a union of these disparates.” This relation is inevitable since, when Coleridge says, “the primary art is writing,” he does not mean to privilege verbal art over others. What he means by “writing” is sign-making. Coleridge recognizes the gap between signifier and signified that is present in all representations of reality, though it is obvious in the difference between inked words on a paper page representing certain sounds and the objects to which these symbols correspond.
The novelty of Coleridge’s rhetoric lies in his insistence on denying strict mimesis. “Art would or should be the abridgment of nature. Now the fullness of nature is without character, as water is purest when without taste, smell, or color; but this is the highest, the apex only—it is not the whole. The object of art is to give the whole ad hominem; hence each step of nature hath its ideal, and hence the possibility of a climax up to the perfect form of a harmonized chaos.” For him the highest revelation would be clear as water or air, empty as a void. By including human desire one muddies but thereby enriches the water, churning up ideas images, attitudes, fears, and hopes that would resolve into nothingness from the eternal viewpoint.
Coleridge belies the pellucid nature of Reality which he correctly notes must lack all attributes through his prejudice in favor of a moral order. Art he claims not only resolves the multifarious elements of the observed world into a single coherent system, it also “stamps them into unity in the mould of a moral idea.” The skeptic might wonder from whence arose this morality, but for Coleridge “the fundamental principle of all this is undoubtedly the horror of falsehood and the love of truth inherent in the human breast.” For him the contemplation of beauty involves the processing of “images, totalized and fitted to the limits of the human mind, [so] as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflections to which they approximate.”
The idea that the moral sense is entangled with the idea of beauty is, like Coleridge’s Christianity as a whole, a matter of faith. (Within the churches, this is, of course an orthodox position.) For him, “to the idea of life victory or strife is necessary; as virtue consists not simply in the absence of vices, but in the overcoming of them. So it is in beauty.” The moral element is not, however, in reality essential to every case of the dialectic of art. Just as life is struggle, drama requires conflict, and we become ourselves through work and struggle, learning through suffering, art, too is generated in conflict but morality may or may not play a role.
At times Coleridge defines the tension required for art in a formal, structural way that seems quite independent of ethics. “The sight of what is subordinated and conquered heightens the strength and the pleasure; and this should be exhibited by the artist either inclusively in his figure, or else out of it, and beside it to act by way of supplement and contrast.”
Apart from the miraculous appearance of morality in the soul and the art, Coleridge’s theory is limited by its reductiveness. There may be countless ways for the work to imply the sort of denial of duality that for Coleridge constitutes a window into profundity, but the result is always much the same. While this may be quite true, it views all great art as essentially similar and all themes as one. Particularities of form or image may play a role in this omnipresent idea, but their specific implications are lost in taking the grandest view, which, though it may not be wrong, necessarily ignores all the others.
Coleridge was motivated by his sense of mortality, poignantly suggested by the dramatically eloquent closing passage on the unavoidable physical decline of the individual. “And with a view to this, remark the seeming identity of body and mind in infants, and thence the loveliness of the former; the commencing separation in boyhood, and the struggle of equilibrium in youth: thence onward the body is first simply indifferent; then demanding the translucency of the mind not to be worse than indifferent; and finally all that presents the body as body becoming almost of an excremental nature.“ The use of the word “excremental,” when speaking of the flesh, sounds almost monk-like.
He devised an escape route from this inevitable decay of the flesh in the pursuit of beauty. The faith that art can vault the spirit into the empyrean provided an alternative to nihilism that bolstered Coleridge’s troubled Christianity. Yet he sought to root this doctrine in Plato rather than Christ. “The life which is in us is in them likewise; and that to know is to resemble, when we speak of objects out of ourselves, even as within ourselves to learn is, according to Plato, only to recollect.”
A personal god is necessary if one is to see intelligence and intentionality in nature as he did. Man’s creativity and god’s are much the same for him. “The wisdom in nature is distinguished from that in man by the co-instantaneity of the plan and the execution.” God is equally required for his belief in some sort of inborn conscience. Though he roamed about the heights of German philosophy and flirted with atheism before conducting an affair with Unitarianism, he settled down with a sort of liberal Anglicanism. He often preferred to sound Platonic as in this passage. “What is beauty? It is, in the abstract, the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse; in the concrete, it is the union of the shapely (formosum) with the vital.” Never quite comfortable with conventional religion, yet unable to do without it, Christianity often appears as here as an implicit subtext.
Coleridge’s essay claims that the knowledge one gains from art is not dependent on the specific data used in a picture or poem, or even in the new perspective that understanding another’s vision can bring. For him the principal value of the beautiful is that it can resolve contradictions and thus bring a person to enlightenment through realizing the identity of inward and outward, divine and human. He means something very close to the Vedantic “Tat tvam asi” though the concept exists in a number of traditions. This is the bold portion of his thesis. These provocative speculations on art’s power to effect a dramatic alteration of consciousness are weakened by his wish to cling to an anthropomorphic deity who like an artist designed the universe and instilled in humanity a conscience. Through his own polemics with himself, through the contradictions he felt in his own life and thought, through mental wandering, he proposed an aesthetic that can enrich our own semi-blinded blundering in the direction of what seems to be truth.
1. The influence of German philosophy on these thoughts has been, it seems, more studied than the thoughts themselves. My intention here is to consider only Coleridge’s assertions, ignoring sources and influences, though Schelling’s lectures on The Philosophy of Art before and certain recent strains of postmodernism after are clearly related.
2. The expression was originally used by the medieval Scholastics. For Spinoza nature is substantially equivalent to god (Deus sive Natura). See Ethic, Proposition 29, scholium to Part I.
3. Even in the first published text, Coleridge calls the idea that nature is actively “giving” its sympathy to the individual an “idle thought.” In his later revision he is more insistent yet that “the idling Spirit” seeking “an echo or a mirror” of itself is making “a toy of Thought.”
4. The first was his own coining, the second, though rare, is recorded by the OED since 1558. Esemplasy was a translation of Schelling’s own neologism “Ineinsbildung.”
5. Notebooks ii.2546
6. This quantitative stress at the end, which makes the artist sound like a juggler trying to keep a large number of objects in the air at once, is misplaced.
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