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Science and Criticism in Coleridge and Peirce

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Science and Criticism in Coleridge and Peirce ABDUCTING THE IMAGINATION: THE METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATION OF SCIENCE AND CRITICISM IN COLERIDGE AND PEIRCE by Thomas Dechand A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland October, 2014 © 2014 Thomas Dechand All Rights Reserved Abstract The core the dissertation examines S. T. Coleridge’s writings on method and imagination from the 1815 composition of Biographia Literaria through the publication of the “Essays on the Principles of Method” in the 1818 Friend. I demonstrate how these writings clarify, develop, and indeed repair Coleridge’s earlier theory of imagination by articulating its role within a general theory of inquiry meant to comprehend the works of science and literature as methodical investigations. Whereas the Biographia fails in its attempt to ground the imagination within a conception of the self as intellectually intuited in a manner conceived by German Idealists such as Schelling, Coleridge’s “Essays on Method” explore the imagination through a theory of inquiry predicated on the discovery, analysis, and contemplation of relations. I argue that Coleridge aligns the operation of the secondary imagination to a logical function: the eduction of an “idea,” according to Coleridge’s precise sense of that term as a necessarily tautegorical relation – one that expresses the same subject, but with a difference. It is ideas, so conceived, that serve to guide inquiry. Coleridge’s refinement of the theory of imagination is done in serve of his argument that ideas are “constitutive” -- that is, they play a fundamental role in what it is, internal to our constitution and that of the world, that enables inquiry in the first place -- and should be seen as part of Coleridge’s answer to what he identifies as the highest problem of philosophy in the 1816 Statesman’s Manual. I emphasize how Coleridge’s “Essays on Method” move him away from the dialectic of major oppositions that fettered his earlier work and still linger in contemporary theory, particularly the opposition between science and poetry in its relation to a metaphysical framework that sees the world as irreducibly split into its “objective” and “subjective” components. ii Part two examines the consonance of Coleridge’s “Essays on Method” with Charles S. Peirce’s later development of logic as semeiotic. I trace the broad compatibility of Coleridge’s account of the operation of the secondary imagination as the apprehension of an idea through the discarding of imagery with Peirce’s depiction of abduction as a mode of inference – aligned with the play of musement – that is responsible for the formation of explanatory hypotheses. Part two does not merely trace historical connections between Coleridge and Peirce (as mediated by the work of Edgar Allan Poe) but identifies a certain strain of reflection on method, imagination, and inquiry that is exhibited tautegorically in the works of thinkers who followed, were influenced by, or appropriated Coleridge in one way or another. One of the key insights of the dissertation is that Coleridge himself introduced – indeed coined – the tautegorical paradigm as a new methodological framework for connecting the ideas and contributions of thinkers from disparate epochs and with apparently disparate backgrounds and motivations. Coleridge, Poe, and Peirce repeatedly single out the work of Johannes Kepler both for its crucial importance within the history of science and for its strikingly imaginative character. Their testimony is used to retrospectively illuminate, via principles that Coleridge was the first to explicitly articulate, the methodological and imaginative underpinnings of Kepler’s 1611 Six-Cornered Snowflake. My analysis of how these thinkers all exemplify Coleridge’s ideas about method and inquiry – but differently in each case – shows how an analysis of historical connections and influences can dovetail with, and be augmented by, the kind of tautegorical explication performed by the dissertation. The dissertation concludes by outlining how the framework developed by Coleridge (and further modified by Peirce) provides the means to theorize imaginative literature as itself a form of reasoning. Unlike contemporary models that seek to account for the literary text as the result of something antecedent to its composition (whether the author’s conscious thoughts and feelings, the author’s unconscious, the various power structures of the time and iii place in which the work was written, and so forth), Coleridge’s model of literary reasoning offers a philosophically and historically grounded means to explore what Kenneth Burke memorably called “literature as equipment for living.” Dissertation Directors: Richard Macksey and Leroy Searle iv Acknowledgments I thank Dick Macksey and Leroy Searle, my dissertation directors, for their curiosity, humor, and willingness to discuss anything in print. My work has benefited greatly from years of conversations with Dick. The first course I took from Leroy showed me the true power of education; its concerns are readily apparent throughout this dissertation. I also thank Len Epstein, my fourth grade teacher, for the care and interest he took in fostering my imagination. Zachary Gartenberg, my former student and now valued colleague, played a formative role in helping me to clarify many chief points in this work. Several students from my Coleridge course and from the Johns Hopkins University Honors Program in Humanistic Studies – especially Zach, Meica Magnani, Ersin Akinci, and Lauren Links – were willing guinea-pigs for many of the ideas in the dissertation. James Searle and the Americanist Graduate Student Group at SUNY-Albany invited me to speak on Coleridge’s idea of tautegory; conversations and friendships sparked in subsequent meetings with James, Christopher Jacques, Joseph Henderson, and Kate Cove happily continue. Marva Philip deserves special notice for helping to facilitate numerous aspects of my studies and teaching. I also wish to thank my parents, Vince and Carol Dechand, and my sister, Theresa Dechand, for their support. This dissertation is dedicated to my wife, Jessica Blackford, whose companionship is a source of tremendous joy. The play of musement has stimulated and propelled our life together as conscious observers of and participants within a larger ecological sphere. v Table of Contents Introduction: Abducting the Imagination ...................................................................................................... 1 Part One: Reimagining Coleridge §1 – Reimagining Coleridge: Introduction ................................................................................................. 23 §1.1 – The Imagination in Biographia Literaria: Goals and Difficulties ............................................... 25 §1.2 – From Biographia Literaria Through “Essays on Method” ......................................................... 33 §2 – “To Descend into the Dark Cave of Trophonius”: Schelling and the Deduction of the Imagination ................................................................................................................................................. 41 §2.1 – “You Must Have a Lantern in Your Hand to Give Light”: On Reading Coleridge’s Debts to Schelling ................................................................................................................................... 42 §2.2 – The Presence of Schelling in Coleridge’s Deduction of the Imagination .................................... 62 §2.3 – “Taken In” by Schelling: Coleridge’s 1818 Objections .............................................................. 68 §3 – Tautegory and the Romantic Symbol.................................................................................................. 76 §3.1 – Coleridge’s Rhetorical Taxonomy: Symbol as One Species of Tautegorical Relation ............... 78 §3.2 – Defining the Symbol: The Statesman’s Manual .......................................................................... 82 §3.3 – The Coleridgean Symbol Exemplified: Wallace Stevens’ “Not Ideas About the Thing, But the Thing Itself” ............................................................................................................................... 86 §3.4 – The Stakes of the Coleridgean Symbol: Numinousness and Foresight ....................................... 89 §3.5 – “The Blindness of Self-Complacency”: Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Temporality” ............ 96 §4 – “The True Import and Legitimate Use of the Term, Idea” ............................................................... 110 §4.1 – The Kantian Background ........................................................................................................... 111 §4.2 – Idea (Tautegory) and Concept (Allegory): John Hunter’s Museum of Natural History ............ 123 §5 – Solving Philosophy’s Highest Problem ............................................................................................ 133 §5.1 – Idea and Theorem: A Brief Note on Coleridge’s Conception of Mathematics ......................... 134 §5.2 – Idea, Foresight, Method ............................................................................................................. 136 §5.3 – A Concrete Exemplification: Learning Newton’s Second Law of Motion ............................... 148 §6 – The Function of the Secondary Imagination: The Eduction of Ideas and the Discarding of Images ......................................................................................................................................................
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