Philosophy’s Debatable Land in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria

Abstract

From the hindsight of On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each (1829) we know that Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) acts as a guidebook for how the philosopher’s work is a necessary prelude to the building of the nation. But Coleridge complains of having suffered the ‘mental disease’ of his speculative nature, of getting lost in the ‘unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths’.¹ Such symptoms ask us also to read the guidebook as a case history with a diagnosis but no cure. Biographia Literaria maps the work of philosophy as a psychic space which makes one wonder how the nation might at the very least cohere as an idealist or ‘imagined community’, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term, not to mention as a political reality.² Moreover, the community of this nationalist fantasy coheres through a power of imagination that is at once unifying and excessive. Coleridge argues that certain ‘disturbing forces’ are necessary to the State’s ‘realization of every great idea or principle’ within its constitution in that they call upon its power to overcome these forces.³ One such disturbance is Mesmerism, whose ‘crisis’, as rapport or clairvoyance, evokes the mind’s ability to internalize ideas, like Church and State, at a profound psychic level. Yet Mesmerism also thwarts this intuition’s political efficiency. If one is compelled to read the later Coleridge as an eminent proto-Victorian whose theory of imagination would seem to prepare the Romantic psyche for its later usefulness within the Victorian public sphere, Mesmerism indicates this psyche’s resistance to domestication, the symptom of a radicalism that Coleridge cannot, perhaps does not want to, leave behind.