Coleridge, Language, and Imagination

The rise of linguistic theory in recent decades has allowed us to see much in Coleridge that goes beyond the traditional concern with imagination, most notably in giving us a broader sense of his vital interest in language. If the Bollingen editions reflect a more traditional, philosophical approach, that approach was in a broad sense recentered on language by Elinor Shaffer and Kathleen Wheeler, and a host of more specific studies of Coleridge's theory of language followed from critics such as Adams, Christensen, Esterhammer, Fulford, Hamilton, and Hodson. Stephen Prickett's discussion of desynonymy revealed just how sophisticated was Coleridge's grasp of the conventionality of linguistic symbols, and James McKusick has pointed to the deep analogies between the foundational verb substantive and God—the 'is' and 'the infinite I AM'. More recently, David Vallins has documented the depth to which Coleridge sees contradiction as implicit in human language. I could not now imagine reading Coleridge without this kind of awareness. What I want to qualify, however, is a tendency to read too much into Coleridge's linguistic interests. I am thinking here of a desire to find in Coleridge a linguistic nominalism or anti-realism of the sort common in theoretical circles until the later 1990s; or the desire to find in his works something akin to Wittgenstein's proposition that 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world'. Attractive though this view of Coleridge has been, I can see little evidence for it. The early Coleridge usually announced his enthusiasms loudly: think of his Unitarianism, or of his writings on Hartley, Godwin, Berkeley, and so forth. But apart from a gnomic comment on Tooke, which I discuss later in this essay, the early Coleridge writes comparatively little on language per se. And the late Coleridge, on which this essay will focus, had views on language that were clearly incompatible with any constitutive approach. The sober truth is that Coleridge was well acquainted with nominalism both in the empirical tradition against which he reacted and in its earlier medieval form, and he did not choose to endorse it. In this essay I shall argue instead that Coleridge did indeed understand the conventionality of human language, but far from making human language the measure of all things, Coleridge believed that its conventionality was a sign of its limitation. Coleridge may speak of God as 'the infinite I AM', but this does not make God either a linguistic entity (an artifact of language), nor even a real being whose nature is essentially one with that of conventional human language. For Coleridge there is a deeply interesting analogy between God as 'infinite I AM' and the role of the copula in logic and human language, but it is merely an analogy between two levels in the great chain of being, rather than a sign of essential identity. Indeed, this must be so because human language, for Coleridge, is a product of the understanding, and as such it shares the limitations of that faculty. The understanding plays no part in the existence of Coleridge's God, being, as I shall show, confined to the finite or human sphere, and emerging (with conventional language) only from the delusory efforts of the Apostatic will to find a self-as-object that is distinct from God. Moreover, the conventionality of human language, for Coleridge, reflects our inability to reason in a purely intuitive or immediate fashion; for as limited beings we are constrained to operate through the understanding and to use reified or conventional tokens. Those tokens, however, are indexed to something outside language. While in the Logic Coleridge …