Barfield Scholarship
Essays, Book Chapters, and Monographs
on Owen Barfield and His Work

R. K. Meiners
A Review of What Coleridge Thought

In the first edition of Romanticism Comes of Age (1944), Owen Barfield collected some of the essays and lectures he had written, mostly for an audience composed of his fellow students of Rudolf Steiner in the Anthroposophical Movement. They had been written over a period of a good many years, years in which Barfield's time for reading, serious thought and writing had to be fitted to the exacting demands of his profession (from 1931 to 1959 he was a practicing solicitor in London). In the Preface to that book Barfield wrote of some of his misgivings: "...I see that the area of subject-matter over which they [the essays] directly or allusively range must appear wide, its communications tortuous and its boundaries ill-defined. I seem to have chosen a continent instead of a country, for a rather haphazard walking-tour."

With feelings at least somewhat analogous to those of Barfield on that occasion, I am undertaking to speak of Barfield's book, What Coleridge Thought . The source of these feelings? Though it is but one book of which I am attempting to write, that book is concerned with an extraordinarily rich and extensive subject, and it demands more authentic intellectual energy from its reader than most books one is likely to encounter.

I will begin by referring again to Romanticism Comes of Age : to the Preface to the revised and enlarged edition of 1966. At the close of that Preface, Barfield referred, rather diffidently, to an essay he had written in 1932 and which he had decided to include in the collection:

Altogether the scholarly work that has been done in this field and the fullness of thought that has been given to it in many quarters make me rather ashamed of the inchoate and skeletal lecture on The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge which I delivered in 1932. I have left it in its place here partly because, though there are plentiful allusions to him elsewhere in the book, a collection of this nature without one essay on STC would be too much like Hamlet without the Prince; partly also as a kind of `trailer' for the amends I hope to make before long in the shape of a full-length book on Coleridge, wherein the whole issue of the `dynamic' philosophy will be taken up on lines not hitherto, as far as I know, attempted.

What Coleridge Thought is that book. I feel about as capable of "reviewing" it as I feel capable of giving a brief digest of the Bhagavad-Gita or a short view of the Grand Canyon. Weak analogies both, but if they give some feeling of immensity, they will serve. What Coleridge Thought is immense, though it is by no means physically large.

I am seldom "awed" by books. I have more than my share of that general irony with which we protect ourselves from awkward reverence. But I am nearly "awed" by this book--the result of 40 years of Barfield's experience concentrated on the still, somehow, inexhaustible fertility and suggestiveness of the mind of S. T. Coleridge. Perhaps I owe it to the reader to say that since I began reading Barfield some eight or ten years ago, his work has become one of the most important elements in my mental life. So I could be thought guilty of reading the general significance that Barfield has had for me into my experience of this book. But I don't think this is the case. If I am right, What Coleridge Thought is not only the most important book to appear on Coleridge for a long time, it is one of the more important books on any subject one is likely to discover. One thing is certain, beyond any quibbles of opinion or personal prejudice: it is a unique book. Nothing remotely like it on Coleridge has ever been done.

In what qualities does this uniqueness inhere? Many could be mentioned. There is the range of Barfield's references and knowledge, cutting across the fields of orthodox philosophy and psychology, scientific theory, exoteric and esoteric theology, philological and semantic theory, literary history, and a good many others; his intimate acquaintance with the large and often unwieldily canon of Coleridge's writing; his great knowledge of the traditions from which Coleridge himself drew; perhaps above all the subtlety of Barfield's intellect, the depth of philosophical acuity, and the firmness of argument which plays through and around every paragraph. I shall speak further of some of these qualities, but for now it may be said that the peculiar quality which distinguishes What Coleridge Thought from the many other books--often very good books--which have been written on Coleridge is this: Barfield's work is organic with Coleridge's own work in a way that not even the most successful of other books on Coleridge have been. Barfield's thought occupies precisely the same spectrum as Coleridge's own (though of course he also knows the textures of western culture since Coleridge's time, and that is one of the important things about this book).

Another way of putting this might be to say, quoting Howard Nemerov's comment on the dust jacket, that "it is not too much to say that in Barfield, Coleridge has met a mind, penetrating, coherent, lucid, that he could have acknowledged as the equal and complement of his own." This sounds like a piece of conventional puffery, but it is not. Or take the book's very title. Cannot one detect a certain implicit arrogance? By what right does this man presume to expound "what Coleridge thought"? Would it not have been more seemly to call the book The Shape of Coleridge's Mind, or Coleridge and the Idealist Tradition, or even An Introduction to Coleridge's Thought ? To the former question I would respond, by something akin to the right of connaturality--thus going even further along that line than Mr. Nemerov. To the latter: such more orthodox and academic titles would give no sense of the way in which Barfield presumes to talk, nor of the commitment he has to his subject. Perhaps there is a certain "arrogance" in presuming that one has penetrated so far into as complex a mind as Coleridge's as to be able to speak without the usual devices of "perhaps" and "it seems to me" and "it appears to have been the case"; but if any book ever vindicated its claim to authority, this is it.

Barfield asks in his Introduction whether there are any qualities which the many excellent studies of Coleridge share, and he responds: "Yes, there are two--the predominance firstly of what I would call the biographical/comparative approach and secondly of the biographical/psychological approach; and I should hope that the terms I was using were reasonably self-explanatory." A little later, speaking of the limitation of the biographical/comparative approach (in language that might apply, in a slightly different manner, to the psychological approach as well), Barfield comments that:

Its learned debates have something in common with the water of Lethe. To become immersed in them is to risk forgetting that one at least of the interesting questions about almost any thought is the question whether it is sound or unsound, valid or invalid, true or untrue. If I find it depressing when a distinguished literary critic complains that `Coleridge has little insight into the incompatibility of different trends of thought,' it is because this seems to me to betray a deplorable inability to distinguish between philosophy and talking about philosophy. Philosophy is, to my mind, not much concerned with `trends' of thought. It is concerned with thought. Is it seriously suggested that Coleridge was incapable of detecting the incompatibility of one thought with another? Or with proven fact? If so, let us first be shown the point or points at which this occurred. Time enough then to start investigating the confused borrowings, or the unconscious motivation, that seduced him to it. (7-8)

What questions are here raised! They are so obvious, and so difficult. We are asked to consider not where the thoughts originated, but whether they are true; not how Coleridge's poor damaged mind managed to fit them together, but whether there are any compelling reasons to pay attention to them. No one has, I think, ever begun to talk of Coleridge in this way (with the possible exception of J. H. Green, who was his "disciple" in a way that Barfield certainly is not); very few writers on Coleridge--or, indeed, any other subject, ever arrive at it. The paralyzing simplicity of questions like: is it true? how does it force us to change our mode of thought? raise a whole series of issues which it is far easier to sidestep or never to raise; it is easier to maintain aloofness, a cultivated and dispassionate suspension of judgment.

Given this approach, Barfield evades some of the dearest "Coleridge problems" in ways that might infuriate more orthodox scholars; he may even lead some to think that he is also sidestepping issues. But there is a pervasive and laconic wit in the exposition which demonstrates that had Barfield cared to address these issues more fully he could have; but he chose not to: there are more important questions. On the vexed issue of Coleridge's "plagiarism": "Verbal plagiarism, as a labour-saving breach of the law of copyright, is a matter of demonstrable fact, and there is not much doubt that, as the law now stands, Schelling could have sued Coleridge in respect of one or two pages in the Biographia Literaria ." (6) (This is the lawyer speaking, and one who knows something of such issues.) This is not the only place where Barfield touches on the plagiarism issue: he lets us know, briefly, that he is not remotely convinced by any "case" against Coleridge, and turns aside to the larger questions. Or take the almost equally celebrated issue of Coleridge's obscurity: his maddening circumlocutions and labyrinthine parentheses, the digressive footnotes, the exotic vocabulary (frequently of his own coinage). At one particularly tricky point in his exposition of Coleridge on Imagination and Fancy, Barfield pauses to remark: "the object of this book is, not to contend that Coleridge invariably expressed himself in the way least calculated to confuse his readers, but to disclose, if possible, what he in fact thought." (83)

Or another issue: more important than those raised in the paragraph above. That issue is the one clustered around the words "organic" and "organicism" and the phrase "organic metaphor." Now Barfield by no means evades this issue (nor does he "evade" the others in any conventional sense); he faces it squarely and at length. But he does so in a way that may cause those of us who are accustomed to thinking of Coleridge along some such lines as the "first major exponent of organic philosophy in English," or as the one who introduced the "organic metaphor" as a means of talking not only about a kind of literary language but of the nature of the human mind, to feel as if we had been suddenly stood on our heads. Precisely what is meant by an "organic" view of the human mind or poetry? That the mind--or poem--grows and develops in a manner analogous to organic life forms, as contrasted with "inorganic" matter? That, says Barfield, is totally misleading: the usual separation between "organic" and "inorganic" will not do to describe Coleridge. If we say, with M. H. Abrams, for example, that we find in Coleridge "organic metaphors of the mind," then we have completely missed the point:

`Metaphor of mind' signifies an extra-mental process described because it is separate from, but analogous to, a mental one, which latter it may therefore lead us to apprehend. Now not only is this not what Coleridge himself thought he was giving us in his psychology and his critical theory; it is what he spent a substantial part of his time and energy explaining that he was not giving us. (59)

If Coleridge was not giving us a "metaphor of mind"; if the phrases "organic metaphor" and "organic theory of poetry" are usually misleading; if in fact his "organicism" is something quite different from what most orthodox scholarship has taken it to be (and Barfield affirms all these things) how shall we begin to understand it? And with this question we have really come to the heart of the matter. There is no easy way to answer the question, though we can begin by making a point which seems central. For Barfield, Coleridge's fundamental premises concerning the nature of life, the relationship between the human mind and the larger world, were so radically different from those of his contemporaries (including many--like Immanuel Kant, for example--with whom one would have thought to find him in agreement), that there was little common ground for a meeting between his views and more orthodox ones. And if this was true of Coleridge's relationship to his contemporaries, it is generally even more true of the relationship between Coleridge and the major traditions of thought since his time.

If this is indeed the case, and I think that it is, where shall we make our entry into Coleridge's mind, and what must we try to understand before we are in a position to decide whether or not to take him seriously? Do his views on man and nature, literature and science, and many other topics have anything of value in them? Is there indeed an alternative view of reality in Coleridge, a mode of thought important enough to take seriously? Now, Barfield answers these questions, but it would be foolish to try to reproduce his argument, which is coherent, consecutive, and at all points demanding. I can touch a few of his points only, and anyone who decides the subject is worth taking seriously will have to read Barfield for himself (as well as more of Coleridge than the customary few chapters from Biographia Literaria).

At this point I must say that anyone who wishes to study Coleridge from a purely "literary" standpoint is going to find Barfield's book hard going; though if he persists he will discover that Barfield casts more light on "literary" questions than narrower approaches have done. It is not until his sixth chapter, for example, that the "familiar" territory of Imagination and Fancy appears directly in Barfield's exposition. Instead, he begins with what was, for Coleridge, the central fact, issue, theme: the question of consciousness. But it is not consciousness considered as a philosophical subject in the usual sense: it is the act of consciousness, the actual experience of thinking, that preoccupied Coleridge. It was in the action and energy of thinking itself, rather than in thought, or consciousness considered as mere object, that Coleridge grounds all he has to say on other issues. Indeed, although the point is subtle and requires more discussion than I can give it, it is crucial that this distinction between thought as an object and the activity of thinking be discerned. Nearly all of Coleridge's leading principles will be discovered to be involved with what was to him a central truth: that the will is involved in all our thinking, even though we may be unconscious of that involvement (If this sounds to us like a contradiction, as it did to Coleridge's contemporaries, we must remember that not only was he one of the great shapers of our modern preoccupation with "consciousness," he was in some ways practically the discoverer of the unconscious.) Barfield emphasizes how essential for an understanding of Coleridge these matters are:

Coleridge will continue to be called `cloudy' even by his admirers, because he will continue to be misinterpreted by readers who are not willing to grasp, and to remember once they have grasped, the elementary principles which consciously permeate almost every other sentence he constructs....These are: first, that thinking is an act. Secondly, that it is normally, though not necessarily and always, an unconscious act. Thirdly, that though we are not normally conscious of the act, we are normally conscious of the product of the act (which we call `thoughts'), and indeed it is this, which actually constitutes our self-consciousness as human beings. (21)

From this discussion of the question of consciousness, which we might call the psychological and epistemological foundations, Barfield moves on to those ontological and metaphysical questions that underlie the problems of consciousness. That is to say, he moves on to Coleridge's view of nature, and life itself. Do those seem large questions, overly philosophical for those who merely wish to deal with STC the literary critic? Well, they are large, but they are also vital; and it is part of the burden of Barfield's book that Coleridge offers a comprehensive view of human experience, and there is no way to understand adequately his views on literature without seeing the larger continuum.

He opens his discussion of Coleridge's views on the constitution of nature by prefacing his second chapter with a quotation from David Bohm's Causality and Chance in Modern Physics . Bohm is an extraordinarily interesting physicist, and the reference to him here is a reminder of how deeply Barfield himself has been interested in the philosophy of science, and how unified and how wide a spectrum his views cover. (One of the later chapters is called "Coleridge and the Cosmology of Science," and while it is foolish to select certain portions of the book as being "more significant" than others, this chapter is full of the most far-reaching implications.) Barfield's point in introducing Bohm and modern physics is to anticipate a point he will develop later: there are some interesting relationships between the dynamics of Coleridge's thought and some recent developments in physics. But it is no part of Barfield's purpose to praise Coleridge by drawing attention to some interesting parallels or happy congruences. On the contrary, he is quick to point out that Coleridge

...takes a further step which differentiates his concept of nature sharply from that of most, if not all, modern physicists. To investigate scientifically the nature of Nature is to investigate the nature of phenomena as such. It is to ask the question: What is a phenomenon? (23)

And to this question, the Coleridgean reply is, in part: "the solution of phenomena can never be derived from phenomena."

Where then must one look for a "solution of phenomena"? The brief answer is: not in natural naturata--or phenomenal nature--but in natura naturans --which might be called "productive nature," though any single phrase of this type is bound to be misleading. Barfield's analysis of the relation between naturata and naturans leads us to the point of recognizing that Coleridge was challenging the entire Cartesian orthodoxy of modern philosophy and science, and that he was attempting to penetrate what he called the "lost dynamics" of the relation between mind and world that had been ruled out of order--"occult," in the precise sense of that word--by the rigid separation of subject from object characteristic of modern western philosophical traditions. Modern science, of course, does not recognize any phenomena that correspond to Coleridge's natura naturans. To which Barfield's (and Coleridge's) answer is simple: of course it does not. How could anyone recognize as phenomenal that which by nature is not phenomenal? Coleridge's naturans is not phenomenal and to dismiss it because it is "not phenomenal" is to beg the question; for it is the very power, the energy, the force, which makes phenomena possible.

And how does "it" do this? Here we are very close to the heart of Coleridge's thought, and Barfield's book. The "answer" is that, at the heart of natura naturans lies the law of polarity: that power which, while one in itself, nevertheless gives rise to a successive duality, which duality in turn strives toward reunion (and if one says, that is only the Hegelian dialectic, one has again misunderstood). These few phrases can give no idea of the importance of this conception, but it must be stressed that the law of polarity is in a sense the pons asinorum ; it must be contemplated deeply if either Barfield or Coleridge are going to make sense. The trouble is, this is the language of exposition, abstract logic, and book reviews. One cannot "make sense" of the concept of polarity; although through contemplation one might arrive at its import, for it is something that can be apprehended only by the imagination. But one must interject that it is not necessarily that to which we (often loosely) refer as the "poetic imagination" that alone can grasp the reality of polar relationship: it is imagination in any of its roles--philosophic, literary, scientific. It is one of the virtues of Barfield's book that he extends the significance of "imagination" far beyond the notions usually held by literature scholars, though not beyond Coleridge's own conceptions (except insofar as Barfield is a twentieth-century man, and Coleridge lived in the nineteenth century).

Polar. Polarity. It is a word we use all the time. Poles. At opposite poles, Polarised. We understand it well enough, for it is part of all our vocabularies. But do we? Whatever it is we may understand by "polarity," I think it safe to say that there can be very few readers--perhaps none at all--who will understand anything like the range of implications which polarity carries for Barfield (I might add that this is especially true in this book on Coleridge, but the observation also applies to the whole of Barfield's work). And here I must do a little quoting from Barfield:

Polarity is dynamic, not abstract. It is not `a mere balance or compromise,' but `a living and generative interpretation.' Where logical opposites are contradictory...polar opposites exist by virtue of each other as well as at the expense of each other; `each is that which it is called, relatively, by predominance of the one character or quality, not by the absolute exclusion of the other.' Moreover each quality or character is present in the other. We can and must distinguish, but there is no possibility of dividing them.

But when one has said all this, how much has one succeeded in conveying? How much use are definitions of the undefinable? The point is, has the imagination grasped it? For nothing else can do so. (36)

The relation of polarity, then, exists at the very heart of natura naturans . It is that "productive unity," that "separative projection" by which the familiar forms of phenomenal nature are continually produced. But "polarity" runs through every phase of Coleridge, and ultimately it is the "secret" which underlies man's relation to the rest of nature, to his society, to God. For it is his conviction of the reality of man's polar relationship to nature that leads Coleridge to affirm, in context after context, that the productive power of nature and the principle of human intelligence are essentially of one kind. As Barfield puts it:

The productive power, then, which in nature acts as nature, is nevertheless essentially one (that is, of one kind) with the intelligence, which is in the human mind above nature.' This is where Coleridge's concept of nature, and of evolution, differs so sharply from the one we are accustomed to that its usual fate with his commentators is to be ignored. For, after all, how can it be so? How can the life-force operative out there in nature--how can any `force'--be of one kind with the intelligence in the human mind? (61)

Barfield is right in his comment, and in his questions. This is the crux. This is so radically different from all we have ever been taught to believe that there are very few people who do not find it "outlandish." Perhaps the philosophically sophisticated will speak of "standard idealistic arguments" (though they would be wrong). Very few modern readers can find themselves capable of taking it seriously, except in an archaeological sense--one more curiosity dug up from the past: interesting for what it tells us of an era, a man. But not to be taken as a viable mode of thought.

And this is a very great mistake. Coleridge's thought, and Barfield's subject matter, is not merely something to flesh out our picture of the Romantic movement and the early nineteenth century. Read seriously and contemplated carefully, Barfield's book is capable of transforming the way we think of literary criticism, of science, of theology--any area, literally, one could name. But as Barfield says (speaking here of science), "We cannot begin to determine Coleridge's relation to science without first proceeding to the somewhat unacademic extreme of making up our minds whether or not we must agree with something he said," (142) To which it must be added: And we must first find out what he said.

This book is the real thing, one of those books that appears only very rarely that is capable of genuinely altering the way one thinks. If anything I have written above seems in the least adulatory, I can only insist that it is not at all so, in view of the subject. Nor should anything I have said be taken to imply that Barfield's book is in turn adulatory of Coleridge--that it blinks his weaknesses, his confusing terminology, his fragmentation; that Barfield is not very much his own man, capable of recognizing Coleridge's shortcomings. Should this be the case, I will have failed to make clear the essential nature of the book, and failed to portray adequately its fundamentally radical character. "Radicalism" may seem a strange quality to impute to Coleridge, but it is a valid one; and it is even more valid to impute it to Barfield himself.

Where does Barfield locate the significance of Coleridge (and, by inference, of his own book)?

It will become apparent to anyone who has the patience to reach the end of this book that I find the relevance of Coleridge's thought to our time where he himself located its relevance to his own. It resides, above all else, in his radical critique of one or two major presuppositions, upon which the immediate thinking, and as a result the whole cultural and social structure of this `epoch of the understanding and the senses' (including supposedly radical revolts against it ) is so firmly--or is it now infirmly?--established. As long as this is ignored, I doubt if he has much to say to us, whether as a philosopher or as a sociologist. (11-12, italics mine)

You can't get much more radical than that, for it digs down into the roots of thought itself.

Source: R. K. Meiners, A review of What Coleridge Thought, in Criticism, Vol. 15, Winter 1973, pp. 174-182.