This is a 6000-word essay that I submitted for a course in EFL University, Hyderabad. Read Part I here.
…for the Romantic the concrete world of things matters little, since it always serves—so says Novalis—as the mere starting point for the “ ‘beginning of an endless novel’ ” (Stern 216 – Political Quixoticism)
Granted, any attempt—of which Adam Stern’s is merely one example—to assert the existence of common foundations across all participants of the Romantic movement is necessarily doomed to failure, since subjectivity in person, thought and action is inevitable. Having said that, were one forced to find commonalities in otherwise disparate poems and their poets (as one is wont to do during the formation of literary canons) then Stern’s aforementioned description of the Romantics becomes useful due to its widespread acceptance, not to mention its accuracy in general. This is because most English Romantics—dialectics or otherwise—viewed their current world as grim—at best incomplete—and completely abstracted from them into idealisms which connote this departure from the ‘concrete world of things’.
One of these idealisms is individualism. Having being liberated from the monarchs and patrons of the Renaissance as well as the Neoclassical tendencies of objectivity, it is fair to suggest that the Romantic movement is the first real individual movement in Britain. However, the manner in which individualism is understood in a modern sense is not the same, I think, as it is understood in the Romantic era. In a modern sense, individualism connotes free will, free choice, Sartrean concepts of acknowledging Authenticity and refusing bad faith, etc. It is not as much concerned with community as it is about self-growth. Deakin calls this a state of ‘deworlded subjectivity’:
…outcome of the crisis of reason that leads to our deworlded subjectivity – a subjectivity that has become released or alienated from the natural world. (Deakin 20)
Individualism has a very different connotation in the context of Hegel than deworlded subjectivity. An individual is fragmented into several self-consciousnesses whom, according to Hegel, are also mired in dialectical struggles among themselves. The self sees parts of its self as the Other—while, simultaneously, so does the Other—upon which there is a struggle to realize and unify an individual’s consciousness. This recognition of an ‘individual’ not as a singular, irreducible entity, but instead as a locus of various personas in dialectical conflict will also be viewed in Romantic thinkers (more on that anon).
For the ‘recognition’ of the self as self, the dialectical struggle within several self-consciousnesses must be resolved. According to Hegel, this follows three steps: the life and death struggle, the lordship/bondsman struggle and the stage of mutual recognition. These steps are self-explanatory, I think. Its implications are more to our interest. For Hegel believed that different self-consciousnesses must ‘recognize’ each other as an individual—a whole, aesthetic autonomous form—for them to unite into a singular entity, after which Geist may be achieved at an individual level.
Hegel’s expansion from attaining Geist in the self to attaining the Absolute in the larger sphere of human history is a mere expansion of this logic. Hegel thinks it is essential that an individual must undergo the steps of life and death, lordship/bondsman and mutual recognition with other individuals. It is only after this that the self can recognize the Other as an independent, autonomous entity existing in the material world. When this occurs, dialectical conflicts disappear, since the two parties do not anymore view themselves as opposing forces, and are now in a position to unite, similar to the process of unity of different self-consciousnesses within a singular individual.
When we attempt to parallel Hegel’s path to transcendence with that of the Romantics, we realize the existence of an inverse process. While Hegel began from the fragmented individual and then expanded his philosophy to complex political, historical forces, the Romantics began with broad, utopic views and then reduced their focus to the individual. Another point to note, as reminder, is that their modes of transcendence came in a secular, anthropocentric world, because this context brings an interesting dichotomy in their findings.
Since Coleridge is a theist, his views on political transcendence are perhaps the most ambiguous, since he clearly attempted a cosmological transcendence from the dialectical oppositions of material politics. I believe that, while Blake and Shelley managed to create a material route to political transcendence, Coleridge fails in this regard, and it is his theistic tendencies that are core to this failure.
Timothy Michael, in British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason, notes that Coleridge’s starting-point of analysis in formulating his basis of political theory, was in analysing the relationship among the various mental faculties of any individual. Coleridge, in The Friend (1812), believed that any viable political theory (i.e. any theory that could transcend the peace-war cycles) must satisfy certain conditions to be considered trustworthy. Those conditions are created among the aforementioned mental faculties. They are purely subjective, and can only be apprehended by what he termed ‘Understanding’ i.e. a form of rationality that remains constrained to the known world (or, what Kant terms the ‘world of phenomena’).
This, for Coleridge, is problematic. Understanding denotes to him the shackles of rationality and of Enlightenment thought. To illustrate: if, in a time before magnetism was discovered, a person was to show the attraction or repulsion of certain metals, then the shackles of rationality (i.e. ‘Understanding’) could not apprehend the very concept of magnetism, since scientists had not even discovered the phenomenon yet. They might equate it to divine intervention or sorcery, since magnetism is still in the undiscovered world (termed the ‘noumenal world’ by Kant), and Understanding is only concerned with the world of phenomena. Therefore, people entrenched in Understanding would subsume genuinely newly occurring phenomena to existing knowledge, thus limiting the scope of knowledge itself. Rationality, thus, becomes antithetical to the spirit of exploration and discovery. This is why, when Coleridge attempts to redefine the parameters of Understanding, a few parameters are particularly interesting:
…(4) to establish that a philosophy reliant on the senses is no longer suited to the material conditions of the nation; and, finally, (5) to define knowledge in such a way as to make room for particular kinds of faith. (Michael 130)
Note the use of faith, and note the general approach of creating tolerance toward philosophies beyond the senses.
Coleridge’s path of transcendence is more famously seen in his seminal critical work, Biographia Literaria (1817) where he is critical of Enlightenment’s conception of Reason, which he believes has been unfairly equated to Understanding. Coleridge is not against Understanding itself, but he views it as an individual, piecemeal, subjective process of gaining knowledge. Understanding is, as explored above, constrained to the world of phenomena and painfully alien from the noumenal world, which should ideally be explored for progress and discovery.
Reason is necessary, then, because it incorporates Understanding with Imagination. Imagination is an intuitive, intellectual quality that guides Understanding and unites all sensory inputs. It essentially brings the best out of all sense perception and in Understanding, and is itself of inherent value to the art of Reason. Reason, armed with imagination, will help in apprehending the noumenal world.
Issues occur when we learn that Coleridge believes that Imagination is truly divine i.e. the transcendental answer to material politics. His justification for this is purely theistic. Deakin notes:
The aesthetic act of creation reproduces the creative drive within nature and ultimately of Yahweh – thus giving the human mind an ontological portal into the otherwise noumenal world. (Deakin 38)
It is easy to problematize this notion of divinity in imagination. What if imagination aids in the identification of elements from the noumenal world, that ought not to have been identified? Can we be certain that God has created humans in His own image? Indeed, as Deakin notes, due to Coleridge not being able to properly explain Imagination as a truly intuitive force, he himself struggled with reconciling the symbolic alterity of receptivity through the senses, with the concept of individual aesthetic autonomy (two dialectical forces).
If Coleridge believes the individual’s Imagination truly transcends all dialectical forces because, simply put, it is a gift from God (and therefore divine), then how can he be certain that this realization of divinity is also a false sense; that is to say, the product of mere material sensory inputs? Who is to say that the cause of all dialectical conflicts is this very Imagination, which then comes into contradiction and conflict with each other, breeding ideologies and, later, wars? Coleridge terms this intellectual intuition divine, but aside from his own conviction that it is divine (supported by his conviction in the Bible), nothing else supports this. The concept of faith is an interesting one, but Coleridge is still attributing it to God, and thus also fails to account for atheist individuals an anthropocentric polity.
Ultimately, as Kierkegaard would put it, Coleridge is encouraging all individuals to take a ‘leap of faith’ in their own Imagination. The more one applies objective, homogenising, thinking minds borne from Understanding, the lesser faith one will have in their own Imagination, since scientific thought is rooted in critical questioning and challenging assumptions. This also explains Coleridge’s devotion to Christianity, for he believed that it alone was a principle that culminated in Faith (a contestable supposition, of course, since Christianity is far from the only religion that culminates in Faith, but a moot point to criticize in the context of this argument.)
Coleridge’s philosophical missteps due to his insistence to incorporate God is necessary to note, since Blake and Shelley do not make these same errors. Blake’s point of departure from the concrete world is often aided with philosophy and his own mythological characters. Instead of supporting a specific political ideology or party, Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, critiques religion while offering his own solution, although not in the same overused vein of the iconoclasts. He attacks Christianity’s morality, within which lie important clues to his proposed transcendence. In the section named The Voice of the Devil, Blake writes:
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors […] 2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body, and that Reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul […] But the following Contraries to these are True […] 2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. (Blake)
Reason and energy, good and evil, light and dark, innocence and experience, the Prolific and the Devouring (as Blake mythologizes them), leftists and rightists, communism and capitalism—all these oppositions, which have so often caused peace-war cycles, are not viewed by Blake as opposites at all. They are complements; elements with their own positives and negatives in their separate contexts, which religion (and, by extension, politics or human history) was wrong to antagonize. Here’s Blake again:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence […] Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. (Blake)
Note the use of passive and active. Blake is once again suggesting that the dominance of one force and the consequent submissiveness of another is not the result of ugly, unfair power struggles, but the natural order of the world. To view them as mutually exclusive elements is a misinterpretation. If one does that, then soon the complement turns into an external, hostile entity and the next logical step appears to attempt its overthrow. Blake is against this: through the mythological character of Urizen, for instance, he shows the pitfalls of any attempts to homogenize thought itself, implying it to be an inevitability of antagonizing the complement.
What needs also to be noted here, is that the destruction of one’s complement is far from the end of this conflict, since at this rate, even the surviving entity is bound to divide and form its own contradictory ideologies. Division and dialectical conflicts turn into an infinite regress, of which the true aim must be to renounce from, instead understanding the harmonic unity of Good and Evil, or of Heaven and Hell.
Transcendence from the dialectics cannot be from the result of exterior events, such as the implementation of an anthropocentric system or the actions of charismatic politician. It is the task of the individual to recognize the autonomy of the Other, and this may only arise from love and forgiveness. As Jeanne Moskal in Forgiveness, Love and Pride in Blake’s “The Everlasting Gospel” puts it:
"Forgiveness" is an act which ushers in the attitudes of acceptance and intimacy. In the Preface to Jerusalem, he [Blake] pleads, "Dear Reader, forgive what you do not approve, & love me for the energetic exertion of my talent" […] Here forgiveness is a forerunner to love […] as opposed to the distrustful remarks in which forgiveness is linked with law. (Moskal 23)
It is not enough to understand Blake’s position in an abstract sense. To truly assimilate it, one must live through and practice both complements. One cannot be Evil without first being Good. One can only attain experience through innocence.
Shelley also manages to transcend from his angst toward the current polity without the assumption of a divine being. In The Masque of Anarchy (henceforth Masque), Shelley seeks to move one step beyond inciting the working class to potentially violent rebellion, which might lead to the mere persistence of the cycles of oppression, revolution and bloodbath. It is in many ways a progression of Shelley’s thought, who always believed in the ideals of liberty and justice, but was now beginning to ponder the practical means of achieving it.
Masque personifies Anarchy, Murder, Fraud and other vices. Anarchy is shown to be dwelling under the monikers of God, King and Law, which further shows Shelley’s disdain for these institutions in his time. Anarchy is killed by Hope midway through Masque, and the rest of the poem is a sermon on Shelley’s ideals on the basis of nonviolence. This nonviolent stance is, however, a very active state, and seems to me as a tactic of reminding the oppressor of their obligations to society—or, as Levinas would put it, to the Other. Here’s an example:
`And if then the tyrants dare Let them ride among you there, Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew,-- What they like, that let them do.
`With folded arms and steady eyes, And little fear, and less surprise, Look upon them as they slay Till their rage has died away. (Shelley)
Shelley’s practical means of resisting oppressive power in Masque centres on Hope, whose appearance provokes a mist that engulfs the people and revives their spirits, leading to the death of Anarchy and its mercenaries. At this point, there may be concern over the new world order that Shelley presents in Masque: many politicians and revolutionaries have been keen to stand for peace and prosperity after rebellion—no less the French Revolution—so can Shelley’s worldview be seen as the end of dialectical conflicts, or a mere progression of them? Shelley appears to have a mature understanding of this conundrum, and I believe his attempt at transcendence is best explored in this brief stanza:
`Then it is to feel revenge Fiercely thirsting to exchange Blood for blood -- and wrong for wrong -- Do not thus when ye are strong. (Shelley)
In Shelley’s mode of transcendence, I am here reminded of Syed. A. Sayeed’s notion of the ‘counterpolitical’, which is a hypothetical construction of a mode of language that resists the logic of power. Here is Syed:
…the hierarchies of power quickly re-establish themselves. In order to obviate this possibility, it must be ensured that the very logic of the system of resistance is antithetical to the logic of power, such that it is impossible for those in control of power to appropriate resistance. By the ‘counterpolitical’ I mean basically this alternative logic (Syed 16 – Dismantling the Political)
Nonviolent resistance is a unique choice. Violence is the weapon of the powerful, the oppressor, and for Shelley the sheathing of the weapon is a counterpolitical act, and escapes dialectical conflicts. Furthermore, nonviolence clarifies the intent of not harming the oppressor’s body, but their ideals. The antagonists of Masque i.e. Fraud, Anarchy, etc. support this possibility, since they are portrayed as personifications of institutions and morals, rather than of humans themselves. The idea, I think, is to separate the vices from the humans, and the hope is that after the oppression ‘dies away’, the oppressors see the oppressed as humans, and thereby forget all class relations. In a nutshell, the result is empathy.
Unfortunately, Shelley’s early demise meant that he could not explore this farther—The Triumph of Life, which explored the same themes in a deeper context, is an unfinished work. However, even though his thought-process may be incomplete, one clearly sees a poet determined to eradicate conflicts on a fundamental level, using active nonviolence as a means of rectifying it.
Conclusion
The Romantics are, till today, characterized for their search for that spiritual transcendence which later expanded in views on nature, childhood, power, morality, etc., and seem to have taken priority over their political influences. In a post-theocentric polity, God is absent and there is nothing above humanity and human relations. However, this did not bring an end to dialectical conflicts and peace-war cycles. Coleridge attempted to craft his own path to transcendence through his firm belief in God. He failed, since in an anthropocentric polity, there will always be people alien to such speculations, making his path more subjective than universal.
Despite his failure, his notion of faith is an interesting topic of discussion, and one that I think has been explored in a more social, universal sense by Blake and Shelley. Blake explored the unity of dialectics by viewing them as parts to a whole. He believed that they were complements that can be united if (a) a person journeyed through both dialectics, and (b) consequently, if they forgave others for their contradictory viewpoints. Shelley’s philosophy was similar, focusing on empathy in human relations rather than forgiveness (which many may argue have the same goal—harmony in social intercourse). Both of these views have been validated by Hegel, who viewed the unity of several self-consciousnesses through mutual recognition, in which one must presume that forgiveness, empathy (and faith) plays a vital role.
The absence of God, thus, magnifies the importance of the Other—indeed, I would argue that the Other has replaced God in an anthropocentric world. The path to political transcendence is no longer when all individuals believe in a common deity—fictional or true—but in individuals recognizing their duty in practicing faith, empathy and forgiveness toward the Other. Paul Fiddes, in Seeing the World & Knowing God, while exploring this very topic regarding the crisis of religion and the search for ‘infinite singularity’, quotes Derrida:
…what can be said about Abraham’s relation to God can be said about my relation without relation to every other as wholly other, in particular my relation to my neighbour or my loved ones who are as inaccessible to me, as secret and transcendent as Yahweh. (Fiddes 64)
In conclusion; mutual recognition, empathy, faith and forgiveness are the paths to transcending dialectical conflicts, as espoused by Hegel, Shelley, Coleridge (albeit for different purposes) and Blake, thus culminating in a preference for the Other rather than an external, transcendental being.
Originally written: 21 December 2020
Comments