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COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University
THE LAST THING COLERIDGE WANTED TO BE CALLED WAS AN EMPIRICIST, yet he devoted hours of his life to minute descriptions of optical illusions, hallucinations, and sensory oddities--"spectra," as he calls them. He records occurrences as ordinary as after-images of colors, (1) double vision (N 1863, 2632), double take (N 2212), and reflections taken as objects (N 1844, 2557, 3159), and as dramatic as flowers on the curtain that turn into faces (N 2082); "a spectrum, of a Pheasant's Tail, that altered thro' various degredations into round wrinkly shapes" (N 1681); a "spectrum" of his own thigh that registered touches as luminous white trails (N 1108); and the apparition of an acquaintance whom he knows not to be in the room. On the occasion of this last hallucination Coleridge recalls, "I once told a Lady, the reason why I did not believe in the existence of Ghosts &c was that I had seen too many of them myself" (N 2583).
The meticulousness of his notebook entries indicates that Coleridge thought of them as a kind of research. (2) It is because Coleridge isn't an empiricist that he is interested in evidently illusory appearances, gathering evidence against phenomenality by noting every time it misleads. He is concerned that phenomenality be recognized as merely phenomenal. "Often and often I have had similar Experiences," he explains, "and therefore resolved to write down the Particulars whenever [begin strikethrough]they[end strikethrough] any new instance should occur/as a weapon against Superstition" (N 2583). Still, Coleridge often sounds as though he doesn't quite know why he finds spectra so fascinating--for he is not only intrigued, but moved. He could fear and love for their own sake images that he knew to be unreal; complementarily, he could not always summon fear and love for things that he thought real, pressing, fearsome, and lovable. His exclamation about the stars and moon in "Dejection: An Ode"--"I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!"(3)--is exemplary of the state of mind in question, one long contemplated in the secondary literature and considered utterly characteristic of Coleridge.
Coleridge's generally pleasurable absorption in spectra stands in contrast to his terror of certain other, equally ephemeral experiences: obsessive thoughts and ideas, memories, and dreams as opposed to daydreams. Although they may seem similar--and what's worse, one may turn into the other--there is a strong distinction for Coleridge between spectra and these mental phenomena, which he calls "spectres." While spectra are collaborations with the sensorium, spectres usually seem to take place inside the self, lack visual distance, and are involuntary: they are unwelcome, intractable impositions. (4) If Coleridge is sometimes puzzled by his attraction to spectra, he is even more puzzled and frustrated by his fear of spectres he doesn't believe in. "Most men affected by belief of reality attached to the wild-weed spectres of infantine nervousness," he notes in a jotting of 1806, "but I affected by them simply, & of themselves" (N 2944).
Coleridge's concerns--his investment in phenomena in whose reality he doesn't believe and his perplexity about what he should feel toward them--are not his alone. Qualities of derealization and hyperlucidity have been treated as signatures of the aesthetic and of ideology. Recent analyses of ideology observe that ideology can captivate while leaving reality testing untouched: the magic of commodity fetishes and the senseless resilience of cultural prejudices affect many people simply and of themselves. (5) Various philosophical traditions struggle, as Coleridge does, to articulate relations to merely apparitional appearances. In the history of these struggles, I want to suggest, attitudes toward phenomenality recurrently depend on attitudes toward diffuse, low-level dissatisfaction. In classical skepticism, dissatisfaction is what we're supposed to feel toward mere phenomena: the principle of akatalepsia, the idea that appearance tells nothing about nonappearance, is often treated as though it meant that appearance told nothing worth knowing. But too much dissatisfaction with phenomenality is also treated with suspicion, this time by realists, on the reasoning that even skeptics' mistrust of appearance overvalues its insignificance. People who seem to be expecting something from phenomena can expect to he accused of expecting too much.
Too much what? Attraction to phenomenality for its own sake may be interpreted, and resented, as a desire to escape from human society. Skepticism toward phenomena is resented on complementary grounds, as a negative interest that indicates the questioner's inordinate craving for more than relation can give. Behind discomfort regarding phenomenality lies the assumption that dissatisfaction with natural conditions--or with social relations broad enough to suggest dissatisfaction with the natural--should not he uttered or perhaps even felt. The conflict over phenomenality is a second-order social conflict about what conflicts it is sociable to have.
Coleridge ponders the social dimensions of attitudes toward phenomenality, as we can see in his remark about "wild-weed spectres." In what turns out to be a persistent association, Coleridge attributes his attraction to spectra and his fear of spectres to something like but worse than the credulity of children. It's childlike to attach "belief of reality" to ghosts; it's worse than childlike--it's incomprehensible--not to believe in ghosts and still be affected by them. Caring about images he doesn't believe in divides him from "most men," Coleridge notes with both pride and exasperation. Although caring beyond belief shows off his autonomy, demonstrating that autonomy, ironically, diminishes Coleridge's influence over other people. The situation can also be read the other way around to imply that Coleridge cares about spectra because he feels alienated from most men in the first place. The circularity of explanations means more than either explanation alone, for it shows the mutually constitutive relation of interpersonal and perceptual experiences. While we accept in theory and yet often ignore the idea that every least perception is itself a social interaction, for Coleridge the identity between social and perceptual relations is noticeable 24/7. One thing that interests Coleridge in spectra, though, is that they reflect sociality negatively, in the value of their apparent freedom. By exercising his imagination through spectra, Coleridge aestheticizes perception; but although spectra are aesthetically escapist, they also index the limitations of social relations and reflect the desire to improve upon them.
Of course, Coleridge thoroughly explored interpersonal interaction as a poetic practice and a poetic idea, especially in his thought about collaboration. His interest in spectra is highest when his partnership with Wordsworth is also at its height, and functions in part as a shadow commentary on their rivalry. This commentary appears in Coleridge's poetry but more often in his Notebooks, as though his reflections on spectra were even in their private form alternatives to conversation. The challenge of the Notebooks is that spectra are more rewarding than the personal exchanges they reflect. This conclusion reaches further than the peculiar misfortunes of Coleridge's interpersonal life. Coleridge's thought about spectra suggests that philosophical dissatisfaction with appearance tout court displaces the crucial possibility that attitudes toward appearance are a mode of expressing and repressing dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction is built into the concept of appearance, if we assume that appearance must be completed by a substantive correlative. But what if we made these assumptions, invented appearance as a figure of incompleteness, in order to transfer dissatisfaction to appearance to absorb it there? Dissatisfaction with nontragic conditions perceived as natural is considered wayward; we express it, therefore, in our attitudes toward our most explicitly contingent experiences: floridly phenomenal experiences like derealization and fleeting optical perceptions. (6) Lingering among the spectra, Coleridge expresses something we do not feel entitled to express because it is so comprehensive and banal: human experience leaves a lot to be desired, and we can neither be reconciled to it nor simply accept our lack of reconciliation.
Like many people who experience dissociation, Coleridge thought himself isolated and misunderstood. He ascribed this state of affairs to his phenomenological and epistemological deviance. The inverse ratio between Coleridge's consciousness of his influence over perceptions and his ability to communicate with people is partly a matter of philosophical taste, as he notes. Thus Coleridge complains of "the pain I suffer & have suffered, in differing so from such men, such true men of England, as [...], & their affectionate love of Locke" (N 1418; see also N 3566, N 4605). The dominant attitude of empiricism, he believes, is only nominally liberal, intolerant of alternative perspectives. In this context, Coleridge's plagiarisms of idealists express his hunger to be in agreement with someone at last. (7)
Coleridge does not view his estrangement from his peers as merely ideological, though, but as a necessary consequence of the sort of creature he must be to hold his beliefs:
And yet I think, I must have some analogon of Genius, because, among many other things, when I am in company with Mr Sharp, Sir J. Mackintosh, R. and Sydney Smith, Mr Scarlet, &c &c, I feel like a Child--nay, rather like an Inhabitant of another Planet--their very faces act upon me, sometimes as if they were Ghosts, but more often as if I were a Ghost, among them--at all times, as if we were not consubstantial. (N 3324)
Coleridge conflates his sense of depersonalization with his derealized perceptions, and both again with childhood as an ontological state. Feeling like a child means living with the possibility of being engulfed by another: if I think you overwhelm my autonomy, I may of course feel depersonalized, ghostly, and different from you. When "a thing acts on me ... as purely passive," Coleridge notes, "I am thinged" (N 3587). The power struggle has its delectations and plots of reversal, which Coleridge describes in the language of the sublime: "Ghost of a mountain--the forms seizing my Body as I passed & became realities--I, a Ghost, till I had reconquered my Substance" (N 524). A child feels like, and really is, the plaything of a stronger being. Calling a child's alienation an "analogon of Genius" only figures the inequality between child and adult in a positive way, turning ghostliness into refinement. But how does an adult sitting in a room with his peers come to feel "act[ed] upon" by "their very faces"?
In a discussion of Swedenborg's visions, Coleridge opines that effects of ghostliness are caused by insufficient consciousness of one's own actions. Swedenborg's fantasies perhaps "arose out of a voluntary power of so bedimming or interrupting the impressions of the outward senses as to produce the same transition of thoughts into things, as ordinarily takes place on passing into Sleep." Because the "successive Images and Sounds" produced in this way are still "distinguishable from actual impressions ab extra chiefly by the uniform significancy of the former," however, and because...
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