Seeing in the Dark: Hazlitt's Immanent Idealism.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-00

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Introduction

THE GRADUAL RENEWAL OF INTEREST IN HAZLITT STUDIES OVER THE PAST few decades has recently intensified, and in doing so has taken a striking turn. Thanks to the earlier work of students such as W. P. Albrecht, Roy Park, John Mahoney, John Kinnaird and David Bromwich, Hazlitt's intellectual reputation has long since emerged from the shadow of Coleridge, to the extent that it is now unsustainable to characterize him simply as the latter's wayward disciple.(1) As this picture has faded, so too has the image of Hazlitt as the gifted but "impressionistic" critic and prose stylist who might safely be studied with only cursory reference to his works in metaphysics and moral philosophy.(2) Lately, however, Hazlitt has drawn the attention of a number of commentators who have identified in his work a philosophical and theoretical outlook which is not just unique, but internally coherent and (some have claimed) quite ahead of its time.(3) Rather in the manner in which Coleridge's standing as a serious and consistent thinker was assembled over the years despite the dispersed and fragmentary nature of his writings, the fact that much of Hazlitt's philosophical thought is scattered throughout a wide range of essays and reviews has not prevented scholars from measuring the telling regularity with which he deploys certain arguments concerning such questions as identity and moral agency, the limits of knowledge, or the nature of creative genius.

Yet this increased attention has also thrown into sharper relief some of the deeper paradoxes in Hazlitt's work; paradoxes which, despite the attempts of at least one critic to identify in them the journalistic writer's attempts to articulate subtle and difficult issues through single, arresting expressions, remain troubling to those who would take him seriously as a theoretician.(4) Foremost among these is his difficult relation to empiricism. Doubt has been cast over the standard view of Hazlitt as a "romantic empiricist," whose work provides a bridge between the ideals of his contemporaries and the philosophies of the previous era which they ostensibly rejected. Certainly, given that Hazlitt's outward opposition to empiricism was more or less constant throughout his career, it may seem remarkable that such a view has persisted. In his 1809 Prospectus of a History of English Philosophy, for example, one of the touchstones for his criticism of Locke is his conviction that "reason is a distinct source of knowledge or inlet of truth, over and above experience."(5) However, it should be noted that even this assertion harbors an equivocation. Hazlitt's description of reason as another inlet of truth, itself suggests a concession to inductivism. In fact, despite his hostility to Locke, what makes Hazlitt noteworthy among theorists of the period is his reluctance to jettison the language of empiricism outright, preferring instead to amend or reform it according to new paradigms. One of those paradigms was the concept of creation, which, when given an epistemic function, drove his oft-repeated conviction that "[t]he mind alone is formative," and that "[i]deas ... are the offspring of the understanding, not of the senses."(6)

The question remained, however, as to just how susceptible the language of empiricism was to such radical reform. Hazlitt's statements to the effect that the mind alone is spontaneously formative often acknowledge Kant as their source or authority, but, unlike Coleridge, Hazlitt's access to the German philosopher was confined to Willich's questionable translation,(7) Consequently, he was unable to draw upon Kant's work in his struggle with the problem which continually worries at the root of his thought. This is fundamentally an epistemological problem, viz., what are the grounds of the truth (or falsity) of the mind's creations? It was Hazlitt's unwillingness to break with empiricism completely by accepting at least the possibility that such created truth might be a priori in nature which leads to his chief difficulties and inconsistencies--and yet, by opening up a powerful struggle of ideas within his work, lends it much of its drama and energy. Having found that even a revised version of the native epistemology was inadequate to the task at hand, Hazlitt, unwilling and unable to turn with Coleridge down the path of full-blown epistemological idealism, proceeds in his later work to question the jurisdiction of epistemology itself, and moves to replace it with an ontology of pure power. Yet the principal tension in Hazlitt's theory--traceable throughout his writing--is the product of his reluctance completely to implement such a move. Revoking epistemology, yet tied by habit and tradition to empiricism's demand for at least some criterion of truth, Hazlitt's thought is suspended between the imperative for a proper account of knowledge, and the obvious attraction of a theory of human psychological activity based upon the paradigm of intellectual energy.

The roots of the dilemma lie with Hazlitt's original philosophical interest in questions of personal identity and practical reason. He regarded with impatience the attempts of certain strands of contemporary moral philosophy, influenced by Hobbes, Hume and Priestley, to explain human action as fundamentally egoistic, self-interested, or determined by association and habit--or indeed, as in some way reducible to a combination of these principles. To Hazlitt, each of these theories (no matter how humanistic in spirit) explained the fundamental springs of human action at the cost of excluding the possibility of moral, that is, disinterested deliberation. The reason for this, he came to decide, was that they took as their starting-point empirical psychology's explanation of the causal mechanism of perception: if the mind was to be free to make genuinely moral choices in its practical deliberations, then its knowledge of those opportunities could not be determined by passively-received sensory input. In other words, it must be capable of some kind of independent epistemic construction: it must have a creative function. In the act of moral imagination, as Hazlitt puts it in the Essay on the Principles of Human Action, the agent "creates the object, he pushes his ideas beyond the bounds of his memory and senses ..." (Works 1.26-27).

After the Essay, as the notion of the "formative" mind, and with it the concept of epistemic creation, became increasingly pivotal to his thought on a more general level, Hazlitt deployed a variety of arguments to explain how such a thing might be possible. One of the most important of these is what might be called his argument from abstraction, but at various times he also makes surprising use of theories of common sense, association, and the self-verifying faculty of reasoning imagination. Finally, there is the appeal to power, initially bound up with his theory of abstraction, but increasingly assuming a significance beyond this--and, indeed, in opposition to it. What complicates matters, as will be seen, is that Hazlitt's peculiar philosophical location encourages him to allow arguments about truth and knowledge to import quite different issues, often psychological in nature, but usually metaphysical. This is reflected in his complex relationship to the philosophers who influenced him; but most notably, in his ambivalent attitude to Hume, and his confusion over the implications of Kant's work.

In Kant's Critique of Pure Reason the question of how a product of the mind's spontaneity can be valid is identified with the problem of how necessary truth can be progressive--or, in Kant's terms, the question--how is a priori synthetic knowledge possible?(8) Placing to one side the soundness of Kant's own account, the question represents what is truly at stake in Hazlitt's theory of the imagination. In epistemological terms, it demands not merely the possibility of psychological activity or synthesis, but of synthetic truth which is true, not because of some correspondence to experience, but a priori. No intellectual element which is literally new (and not merely the result of the combination or aggregation of antecedents) can be verified by the thing which it transcends by its very nature as an original truth. In short, the mind's creation, as Hazlitt depicts it, presupposes as a necessary condition, the possibility of a priori synthetic knowledge. However, the corollary (some would say the weakness(9) of Kant's transcendental method is that the grounds of spontaneity cannot themselves be known; or at least, they can only be thought, or postulated, as the necessary conditions of experience. Concealed from philosophy and speculative reason, the absolute, noumenal constitution of the thing in itself (which includes the individual's own identity) lies beyond the limit of human knowledge. What was to stimulate Schiller and the German romantics about this arrangement was the idea (suggested by Kant himself in his second and third Critiques) that practical reason and artistic creation might themselves draw us nearer to what was essentially unknowable.

However, this avenue was not open to Hazlitt. His own ingenious (but ultimately unsuccessful) strategy was to hitch empiricism to a radical theory of abstraction, the result being a philosophy which, while remaining epistemologically empiricist, was metaphysically idealist (hence his consistent opposition to materialism: the life of the mind, Hazlitt declared, was just as much a constitutive part of reality as matter itself). Yet the constraints of empiricism meant that Hazlitt's idealism was never permitted the kind of transcendental view of itself necessary to assess its own limits. The result was a kind of immanent idealism; one capable neither of self-critique, nor metaphysical progression. His conviction that knowledge was at least in part mind-legislated was stymied by his inability ,to accept the possibility of a priori truth. His argument, against Coleridge, that knowledge of the absolute was impossible, was not, as some have suggested, a proto-Kantian position, but the result of the breakdown of his own theory of knowledge.(10) Hazlitt came to the conclusion that if empirical epistemology could not sanction the creative activities of the moral imagination, then there was something incomplete in epistemology itself. The conventional notion of truth was to be changed for one of power: it was power which, at the most fundamental level, guided our...

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