Goethe
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772-1834) |
"[Coleridge's]
face," Barfield explains, "was turned . . . in the opposite direction to
the one which natural science was taking in his time and, in spite of his
efforts and those of a few others like him, has continued to take since
his death. For it was his firm conviction that, if knowledge was to advance,
there must be a science of qualities as well as quantities" (CTC 40).
The author of a book-length
study of his intellectual development, the editor of his "philosophical
letters" for the still-in-progress definitive edition of his work, Barfield
obviously owed a substantial debt to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).
It might even be said that Barfield identified with his fellow Romantic
polymath for at least three reasons.
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Beleaguered since his
youth by problems with stammering, Barfield empathized with Coleridge's
own difficulties with speech:
[Coleridge's extraordinarily
unifying mind] was too painfully aware that you cannot really say one thing
correctly without saying everything. He was rightly afraid that there would
not be time to say everything before going on to say the next thing, or
that he would forget to do so afterwards. His incoherence of expression
arose from the coherence of what he wanted to express. It was a sort of
intellectual stammer. (RCA 146)
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Coleridge's fame and
reputation suffered, both in his own time and today, because of his presumed-to-be-unhealthy
interest in German philosophy--a price Barfield too has paid in a century
in which Germany has inaugurated two world wars.
Speaking, as he
had to do, to his already empirically minded English contemporaries, he
had, so to speak, to lay down his track as he went along, and caterpillar
wheels are slow compared with ordinary wheeled traction. But then they
can go into much cruder places. If the German thinkers could count on at
least a second-class road of understanding into the minds of their readers,
Coleridge tried to penetrate where there was no longer a road at all; to
awaken to active thought minds for which "the conceivable" had already
been "reduced within the bounds of the picturable." (WCT 43)
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And, like Coleridge,
Barfield has been misunderstood because of the unorthodox and misunderstood
nature of his intellectual project--his "thinking
about thinking," or "Beta-thinking" (as
Barfield terms it in Saving the Appearances):
But though it is
not mysticism, to reason about thinking does entail our being led inward
from the product of thinking to the act itself. And this does require a
certain discipline. Here is the root-cause of the charge of "obscurity,"
which was leveled during his life, and has so often been leveled since
his death, against both Coleridge himself and his philosophy. (WCT
16)
In Romanticism Comes
of Age, Barfield contrasts Coleridge with Goethe,
a comparison which leads to an illuminating, almost physiognomic, descriptive
analysis of Coleridge's physical appearance:
Goethe had
his feet firmly planted on the earth. As a scientist, as a knower, he largely
confined himself to the realm of natural science and his regular industry
combined with his great genius had by the end of his life illuminated this
realm with a steadily increasing flood of light. Coleridge never succeeded
in finding his feet on earth at all. Look at the portrait of him in the
National
Portrait Gallery in London, and you will feel the full force of Wordsworth's
description:
The rapt one of
the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed
creature
Compare the majesty
of the forehead and the eyes with the pathetically weak mouth. He himself
said that he had "power without strength." He was continually forming vast
schemes of works to be written on every conceivable subject, or on all
at once, which he never had the energy to carry out. (RCA 161-62)
In the final reckoning,
perhaps Barfield had more in common with the firmly-grounded Goethe.
See in particular
What
Coleridge Thought,
passim, "The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge" (RCA 144-63). |
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