David P. Haney. The Challenge of Coleridge: Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University

David P. Haney. The Challenge of Coleridge: Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii + 309. $55.00.

Let it be said at once that David Haney has given us a remarkable and important book. Its goal is to read Coleridge in the context of modern thinking on ethics and hermeneutics, and its strategy is to create a kind of "meta-conversation," bringing Coleridge into a serious intellectual exchange with such thinkers as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas. As Haney says at the close of his dense and richly textured argument, "The point is not to catalogue either the blindness or the insight on either side of the conversation, which would suggest the hubristic possibility of rising above the conversation itself. The point is rather to have the conversation and reflect on it." This conversation "needs no justification beyond itself" (262).

The first important parallel between Coleridge and Gadamer is the use they both make of what has come to be called the "hermeneutic circle," in which "the parts of a text can be understood only in the context of an evolving foreknowledge of the whole" (5), and Haney suggests that "an important link between hermeneutics and ethics" can be found in the "ethical implications" of the circle (5). Coleridge, who (like Gadamer) is "deeply rooted in both the Protestant tradition of biblical hermeneutics and the German idealist tradition, sees the circle in theological terms with clear ethical implications." As Coleridge writes in Biographia Literaria: "In order to an efficient belief in Christianity, a man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths" (6). Gadamer parallels this in his comment on Rudolf Bultman: "All understanding presumes a living relationship between the interpreter and the text." This is, Haney says, "a requirement for 'fore-understanding'" (7).

The "evolving" of this circle is at the heart of Haney's endeavor. As Gadamer insists (in Haney's summary), "a work from the past means more than it did at the time in the sense that subsequent interpretations of a historical phenomenon form a part of 'the web of historical effects' that should prevent us from 'taking its immediate appearance as the whole truth'" (12). One might be reminded...

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