Wayne George Deakin’s research while affiliated with Chiang Mai University and other places

In this chapter I will develop the argument that German philosophical Romanticism and Hegelian speculative philosophy offer an interesting space in which to undertake re-readings of English Romanticism. Starting from a Hegelian stance, I argue that Romanticism can be re-read in terms of a vacillation between two positions: one of imaginative autonomy and one of necessary receptivity. I argue that what I term symbiotic alterity of autonomy and receptivity reaches a pivotal historical stage in romantic metaphysics and is something that at the same time remains implicit in Hegel’s dialectic — thus making Hegel a major romantic thinker. I would like to situate my argument in a teleological context, integrating Hegel’s social philosophy with his philosophy of art. Furthermore, I briefly outline some current readings of German romantic metaphysics, in order to help contextualise Hegelian aesthetics with regard to Romanticism as an overall movement. I conclude the chapter by examining a number of current readings of Hegelian aesthetics and assessing how these readings can be appropriated in part for my own project of a rereading of English romantic poetry.

In this chapter I discuss Wordsworth’s early poetry written between 1798 and 1805. This period corresponds to Coleridge’s early work discussed in the last chapter and to the early stages of the composition of Wordsworth’s planned philosophical epic, The Recluse. I argue that during this period of creativity he attains a metaphysical equipoise 1; that is to say, he attains a deep balance between the outer world and the inner mind. This equipoise consistently eluded Coleridge in his own poetry. The main reason for Wordsworth’s success is his poetic organicism, the view that there is a deep connection between the imaginative powers of the poet and the natura naturans experienced when the poet communes with the natural world. While there is a clear connection with Coleridge’s theoretical dualism of the mechanical and the organic, 2 for Coleridge this theory is mainly placed in the service of his literary criticism rather than in actual poetic creation. By contrast, Wordsworth seeks to attain a union between mind and the natural world through careful deployment of stylistic devices in his poetry. In this way, Wordsworth’s organicism comes very close to the German Naturphilosophie explored by Coleridge.

Shelley’s poetry reflects various philosophical ideas that shaped his thought from his years at Oxford through to his years in Continental Europe. An early influence, for example, was William Godwin, in particular his teleology of perfectibility that encourages a rationalistic approach to history, which helped Shelley formulate his youthful political hopes and aspirations in a clearly defined political discourse. Godwin’s gradualism — his commitment to slow realisation of progressive ideals over time — was unattractive to Shelley, who thought the model inimical to the hopes of imminent change and political practice in England in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution.1 Furthermore, Shelley’s early infatuation with the materialism of Baron d’Holbach2 complicated his engagement with Godwin’s rationalism. D’Holbach placed human agency in a naturalistic and deterministic context — whereas Godwin viewed agency as fundamentally rational and free (i.e. as capable of rationally determined choices). A further influence on Shelley was the British empirical tradition, culminating in Humean scepticism, which further called Shelley’s faith in metaphysical systems into question. These very different and seemingly irreconcilable philosophical influences led Shelley to develop a position that has been called sceptical idealism, whereby Shelley’s view of the world is sceptical in the sense of what one can know and ideal in the sense that this knowledge is premised on a Platonic understanding of the universe.3

In this chapter I use the explanatory framework I developed in Chapter 1 to examine the vacillation between receptivity and autonomy as experienced in the work of Coleridge. This vacillation manifests itself in Coleridge’s work in an inherent tension between receptivity to the external world and an aesthetic autonomy – an aesthesis whereby the subject formulates a work of art which provides an independent intellectual intuition of the infinite. In so doing, the subject produces a self-sustaining, balanced and organic work of art – or a ‘deworlded’ work. This tension between a contingent “deworlded subjectivity” and an associationist psychophysical parallelism, whereby the subject is of necessity bound to the sensible world, is never really resolved during his lifetime. In terms of his philosophical response to the post-Kantian philosophical landscape, Coleridge famously attempted (and failed) to formulate an epistemological foundationalism in chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria (1817). His aim there was to argue for an intuitive status for the imagination, which would transcend the dualism of the noumenal and the phenomenal world. However unsustainable Coleridge’s foundationalist hopes for the romantic imagination, these ideas provide us with an interesting perspective from which we can approach his poetry – that is, in terms of a generative tension between an absolute idealism and an empirical-realism or between imaginative autonomy and receptivity to the external world. This tension is also partially characterised in Coleridge’s poetry by the tension between symbol and allegory.

In the previous chapter, I claimed that by the time of the “Triumph of Life” Shelley had come to a post-romantic recognition that there is no position of pure aesthetic autonomy and of world-transcendence, acquiescing to the historicity and contingency of human experience. Following Shelley’s logic, I sought to describe this new position in terms of the knowledge of non-knowing. In this chapter I gather together the different strands of discussion and conclude with a two-part argument about English romantic discourse. In the first two sections, I argue that Wordsworth and Coleridge set up a distinct romantic discourse that we can read in retrospect as illuminating some of the inherent tensions in romantic metaphysics. This particular discourse, as I have argued throughout, is inherent in the struggle towards an aesthetic recognition as understood as part of the personal and critical conversation between Wordsworth and Coleridge. I also use a phenomenological perspective to postulate that the work of both poets is based upon their relative sense of embodiment. In the third section, I argue that the literalisation of this discourse — a process in part due to its gaining common acceptance and currency as a recognisable romantic discourse — enables Shelley to produce a second-order discourse that affirms non-knowing. Shelley is able to usher in a new shape of romantic experience that acknowledges the ironic, embodied, historicist, perspectival and contingent nature of experience.