Durham E-Theses Ars biographica poetica: Coleridgean Imagination and the Practical Value of Contemplation CHEYNE, PETER,ROBERT How to cite: CHEYNE, PETER,ROBERT (2014) Ars biographica poetica: Coleridgean Imagination and the Practical Value of Contemplation, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10754/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Ars biographica poetica: Coleridgean Imagination and the Practical Value of Contemplation Submitted by Peter Robert Cheyne For the degree of Ph.D. in Philosophy, Durham University, 2014 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who requests that no quotation from it be published without the author’s prior written or e-mailed consent ([email protected]) and that information derived from it be acknowledged. 1 This work is dedicated with love and prayers for my wife, Sachie Francesca, and our children, Maria Matsumi, Angus Keita, and Martha Taylor. 2 Peter Cheyne, Ars biographica poetica: Coleridgean Imagination and the Practical Value of Contemplation This thesis begins by examining how Coleridge Romanticizes Platonism. I argue that Coleridge creatively recasts Plato’s Divided Line analogy, and thereby finds a higher role for a radically re-thought imagination. Through this recast imagination, Coleridge develops a Romantic Platonism by elevating imagination and modifying Plato’s linear scheme into a polarity that harmonizes sense and reason. I argue that Coleridge’s philosophy develops in response to the Empiricist philosophy that dominated the British practice, and transcendental idealism that flourished in Germany. I argue that Coleridge’s philosophy is neither Empiricist, nor a mere translation of German idealism, as critics have sometimes suggested, but that it is quintessentially Platonic. Unlike Plato, however, Coleridge elevates the status of imagination, separating it from fantasy (or fancy, as he calls it), which retains the subordinate position it has for Plato. Attacking Empiricist philosophy, Coleridge argues that reason and its Ideas (and not the understanding) constitute and indeed exceed the apex of human thought, a distinction corresponding to Plato’s between noesis and dianoia. I present a view, developing from Coleridge and answering Plato, of how the practical and the contemplative lives can bring each other nearer to fulfilment, such that, to use Plato’s terms, contemplation can be perfected in the return to the cave, rather than be prevented there, as is often feared. I examine how Coleridgean imagination and reason operate as the higher, ‘spiritual mind’, balancing the lower ‘mind of the body’. While the lower mind desires and consumes, with fancy restlessly moving through ever-shifting mental images, the higher mind yearns, and contemplates, finding stillness in beholding value. I propose what I call the contemplative ars biographica poetica, suggesting not only that we should live our lives as the poetic art of life-writing, but also that we already do so. Usually we shape our lives unawares of any poetic task, yet we manage nevertheless to retrieve moments of strikingly beautiful meaning despite decades-long disasters prolonged by deliberate blindness and a pathological obstinacy that values mere repetition above reason. This art at its best, however, relates to philosophy as the former seeks in the latter a satiating vision, a wisdom to answer profoundest yearning. 3 Preface This dissertation was completed part-time, registered at Durham University, while living and working in Japan. It develops from my MPhil thesis, Mood and Self in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre,1 which proposes a unitary existentialist conception of mood as disclosing value and transcendence in our lives. The present work extends the theme of contemplation as appreciative beholding, and progresses to consider the objectivity of the value disclosed. After completing my MPhil at the University of Kent at Canterbury, under Sean Sayers’ supervision, I moved to Japan and married my college sweetheart, Takako, who had a few years earlier returned to Japan after finishing her psychoanalytic studies, also at Kent. Working at Fukuoka University, I kept my enthusiasm for teaching English as a Second Language by using English poetry, and themes and stories from Philosophy, especially from Plato. I hoped to continue my philosophical research, and my MPhil suggested further research into what Coleridge calls the union of deep feeling with profound thought (Biographia I, 80). I was only dimly aware, through reading Warnock’s Introduction to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, of Coleridge’s forward-reaching connections to phenomenology, or even those returning to Platonism through Neo-Platonism. Coleridge for me meant a few remembered quotations, and an air of mystery about the ‘Kubla Khan’ poem in a copy of The Readers’ Digest Book of Strange Stories, Amazing Facts: Stories That Are Bizarre, Unusual, Odd, Astonishing, Incredible - But True left to me by my grandfather, Vivien Smith, who died young. The story in that strange, heavy, dark-red, musty, clothbound, hardback book that so captured my seven-or-eight-year-old imagination retold the mystery of ‘Kubla Khan’ as a vision in a dream that was left apparently unfinished because its composition was interrupted by ‘a person on business from Porlock’. In Fukuoka, with first child, Maria, on her way, I wished to strengthen my academic credentials to get a teaching position elsewhere in Japan before my eight-year limited contract at Fukuoka University expired. I hoped to develop my interests in Ideas in the Arts, and I believed that specializing in the German, French, or Danish philosophers of my MPhil thesis suited future job-hunting less well than researching a great literary and philosophical artist and thinker famous for masterly compositions in the English language. This answers the question ‘Why Coleridge?’, who is overlooked by today’s philosophers, despite his bright flashes of philosophical insight arising from and developed by long and deeply-mulling powers of discernment. When put this way, one might see why Coleridge, above all other philosophical artists,2 could help centre my interests in the problems that also attract Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus; the English Platonists and Renaissance poet-philosophers, especially Shakespeare; and Kant, Schelling, Schiller, et al, all of whom being the same authors informing Coleridge’s researches. I enrolled part-time at Durham University in early 2003, agreeing with my supervisor, David Cooper, to spend my long vacations at Durham. Over several supervisions we discussed the shape of a thesis on the meaning of life informed by 1 Submitted to the University of Kent Philosophy Department in 2002. 2 T. S. Eliot, for example, whose PhD thesis on Bradley’s profound ethics and ontology, and his influential poetry and criticism, would have allowed a study of Ideas in the Arts, but would not have satisfied my desire for a philosophy of contemplation. 4 Coleridgean concerns. Very soon, however, a profound concern with the meaning of life struck my young family. After Maria Matsumi was born, my thirty-two-year-old wife, Takako, was diagnosed with Stage IV stomach cancer, receiving a six-months terminal prognosis from Fukuoka University Hospital oncologists. Their prognosis was accurate. Takako never complained of her condition. Intense pain repeatedly came and passed, but her gentleness always remained. She stayed mostly at home, not hospital, and I remain deeply grateful to John Hatcher and Yukiko Ōshima of Fukuoka University English Department for arranging six months paid compassionate leave so I could look after my wife in our final months together. We were still in the honeymoon of our short marriage, and Takako was always thankful for her share of life. Being a single father to a toddler and teaching nine periods a week at Fukuoka University, plus up to three weekly sessions at Kyushu University, meant postponing my studies. By 2009, David Cooper had retired from teaching at Durham, and he recommended that Andy Hamilton supervise my resurrected thesis. Andy’s understanding of the fine line between philosophy and intellectual history has been very valuable. Andy has helped most with his deep thinking into philosophical aesthetics and his continued calls to rewrite with a feel for style as well as clarity so that the philosophical critic never forget that he or she too, and not just the artists and philosophers one writes about, is engaged in an art, and not a business. Hamilton’s aim therefore converges with Coleridge’s, insofar as both agree that all technique and creative effort be used ultimately for humane cultivation. Very generous with his time, and well beyond the call of duty, Andy twice visited me in Japan. First in rural Miyazaki, then in central Kyoto, we spent several weeks and many cups of tea discussing the importance of style in philosophy. Where this thesis is stylistically deficient, it is certainly not for want of my supervisor’s efforts. In 2012 I remarried, and without my wife Sachie’s support I might not have finished this thesis. For all the current work’s faults, in Sachie’s presence I found the steady guide of renewed purpose that I have tried to maintain throughout the final writing stages.