Philippe's Reviews > Experience into Thought: Perspectives in the Coleridge Notebooks

This slim volume of three Alexander Lectures by Kathleen Coburn was published in 1979. By then she had been working on a scholarly edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notebooks for a good thirty years. The final volume of the five-volume Bollingen Edition was published in 2002, eleven years after her death. The notebooks, six dozen in all, are exactly what their generic title suggests: a miscellaneous jumble of thoughts and diary-like snippets collected by the philosopher-poet over a period of 40 years. Despite their informal and private nature, the Notebooks have been described as "perhaps the unacknowledged prose masterpiece of the age" (to quote Seamus Perry in his introduction to the one-volume selection of the Notebooks published by OUP). Incidentally, similar praise has been directed at Leopardi's Zibaldone, an almost contemporaneous Italian counterpart to Coleridge's diaries. While the Leopardi work is easily accessible to English readers via the complete edition published in 2013, few mortals will have direct access to the annotated Coleridge edition. Most copies have disappeared into the vaults of university libraries. And they are prohibitively expensive. The book edited by Perry (a mere 290 pages, about half of which are devoted to notes) offers a sort of halfway house for readers curious about the actual shape of the notebooks' raw material. A filtered view is available via Richard Holmes's 1000-page biography, which weaves directly quoted notebook material into the texture and narrative of the poet's life. Coburn's compact set of three lectures offers an even more oblique view on Coleridge's stream of consciousness.

The first lecture is a general introduction. It situates Coleridge in the early 18th-century English intellectual and literary landscape, and goes on to discuss the first steps in the editing of his complicated legacy by his in-laws and descendants. What follows is a loosely sketched psychological portrait, centred on a tension "between outward appearance and living reality", which, Coburn argues, created a distrust that served as a source for his poetry and philosophy. I find this assessment puzzling. On the basis of my reading of Holmes's biography, I would draw exactly the opposite conclusion, namely that Coleridge's foundational experience is one of alignment between the generative processes of nature and his own creative powers. His is indeed an 'art of recognition'. Coburn quotes a notebook entry from 1805 that makes this point: "– In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new." My hunch is that this process of anamnesis, this felt mirroring of life's creativity in his own consciousness, was a source of joy and curiosity for Coleridge, and later in his life also an explicit source of faith. As a result I find it hard to concur with Coburn in her assessment that "the sense of contradiction then, between the world within him and the world without, was there from earliest days and seems to have fostered a capacity for asking questions that went on developing throughout his life."

But maybe I didn't get the point of the first lecture. For in the next part, Kathleen Coburn zooms in on like-minded souls, intellectual mavericks, who appear in Coleridge's notebooks as sources of inspiration: Jakob Böhme, Paracelsus and Giordano Bruno. These three marginal thinkers are foregrounded as models of the kind of intellectual and imaginative daring that was all too often lacking in the Age of Enlightenment. She quotes Coleridge musing that "whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy during the last two or three centuries, cannot but admit, that there appears to have existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science." What Coleridge seems to be suggesting here is a kind of conspiracy by representatives of the intellectual mainstream to sideline certain ways of thinking. I think this is a fair assessment. And Coburn unwittingly confirms it by focusing on three 16th and 17th century thinkers who belong to a distinctive and resilient, but marginalised, esotericist tradition. Wouter Hanegraaf has written an incisive essay on the correspondence between the intellectual tenets underpinning the Romantic movement (organicism, the role of the imagination and temporalism, each of which is a crucial feature of Coleridge's philosophical and artistic project) and how these are congruent with key features of esotericism. All of this is confirmed by Coburn's discussion, but she refrains from connecting the dots. Instead, she stubbornly returns to the key point of the first lecture, but reframes it with a sleight of hand from a metaphysical (or phenomenological) consideration to a matter of politics: "We are back to the conflict between appearance and reality again, and Coleridge’s distrust of the ‘mere Facts’ men over against the metaphysicians, of the professionals as against the imaginative amateurs."

The third and final lecture focuses on the relationship between lived experience, philosophical reflection and poetic expression. The orthodox view is that metaphysics stood in the way of the unfolding of Coleridge's poetic genius. Coburn disagrees, seeing both as intellectual and creative endeavours, mutually illuminating and grounded in empirical observation. Again, she confirms the fundamental alignment between the principles of natura naturans and artistic creation: "For a dynamic vitalism like his, the basic principle of all life was a mysterious energy behind all creation not to be sufficiently explained by any material science. The same initiative energy was the mental and emotional antecedent necessary to the creation of a poem, or any work of art." So vital energy is both a metaphysical principle, a phenomenological datum and a poetic substrate. The second part of the lecture deals with the fragmentary nature of Coleridge's philosophical legacy. It was his lifelong, unfulfilled ambition to bring his ideas together in a grand synthesis. At the time of Coburn's lecture, the Opus Maximum had not yet been published. This did not happen until 2002, as part of the Bollingen edition. Coburn considered the search for a closed Coleridgean system to be elusive: "I doubt if it can be shown from any fusion of the various fragmentary drafts that Coleridge left a systematic philosophy in the commonly accepted sense". It now seems that a systematic philosophy, drawing together key ideas from German Naturphilosophie, Kant's transcendental philosophy, and Trinitarian Christianity, might be constructed from elements found in three late works, the Biographia Literaria, the Logic, and the Opus Maximum. I won't speculate on this as I haven't read any of the primary sources or any of the philosophical commentaries published after the publication of the Opus Maximum. Bypassing this lifetime commitment, however, I do think it would be a tantalising exercise to subject the raw data contained in the notebooks to syntactic and semantic analysis using advanced natural language processing and generative AI tools. From this primordial soup, would the contours of a key idea emerge, one that fuses the Many into the One?

Postscript: Kathleen Coburn's basic aim was laudable and necessary. At the time of delivering these lectures, Coleridge was still widely known as a crackpot. Coburn's contribution was an early step in the progressive rehabilitation of a wayward genius.