The Challenge of Coleridge: Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Romanticism [Hardcover]

David Haney avails himself of the wedding of hermeneutics and ethics, and brings to bear twentieth-century categories and practices on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work in Haney's recent book, The Challenge of Coleridge. At the same time, Haney further articulates and analyzes those very categories and practices in Coleridge's terms - of polarity, trinity, unity, poetic faith, imagination, will, among others. Two of the major figures to represent 20th century hermeneutics and ethics are Hans-Georg Gadamer and Emmanuel Levinas; minor figures include Paul Ricoeur, Wayne C. Booth, Martha Nussbaum, and Bernard Williams.

Haney distinguishes and discusses ethical issues of interpretation on several planes of literary critical analysis in general, and the study of Coleridge's work in particular:

- Explicit ethical judgments in the work of Coleridge, and the interrogation those judgments experience in light of 20th-century criticism (Chapters 6 and 7)
- The reader's/critic's engagement with and relationship to the text under consideration (Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 7)
- The poet's relationship to his own creations (Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6)
- The role of literary texts in ethical evaluation (Chapter 2 and 5)

Haney demonstrates thoroughly that Coleridge's work rewards the hermeneutic/critical scrutiny; but whether or not Coleridge's work also poses an authentic challenge to contemporary hermeneutics and ethics is arguable. Haney certainly proposes his intent in less than challenging words: "I use a reading of Coleridge in dialogue with twentieth-century criticism and philosophy to explore the question of how ethical problems of human interaction are related to the interpretive problems of how selves understand the world and each other." (xi) Hardly fightin' words.

Haney's book does affirm, as he claims, the relation between hermeneutics and ethics in general, and between Coleridge and contemporary critical theory in particular, but that relation is one of analogy, rather than reciprocal influence or challenge. Do we interpret situations and people, and as a result, interact with them in a characteristic way, because we have implicitly or explicitly adopted twentieth-century hermeneutic principles? And does reading Coleridge challenge this influence, whether by bringing to awareness what was only implicit - and thereby exposing those assumptions to scrutiny - or directly questioning what is explicitly employed in the activity of interpretation?

At the very least, Haney has thoroughly demonstrated, in the particulars of Coleridge's work, that, like our interactions with other human beings, our interpretive engagements with texts make ethical claims on us: "The process by which the author is effaced when his or her utterance enters the technology of written reproduction is also the process by which the poetic word, freed from the bonds of authorial intention, is presented in its true otherness, such that we can engage it according to the ethical structure of a conversation with an other." (69) In both encounters, there is the possibility, the danger, and often the fact, of domination, repression, condescension; both the text and the person become invisible, get trampled on. Levinas' work on subjectivity, and Gadamer's work in hermeneutics, are effectively discussed in a way that makes a prima faciae case for the relevance of Coleridge's own work, poetic and discursive.

Haney questions the twentieth-century theory in Coleridge's terms, and really puts elements and features of that theory into question. Especially in the later chapters, Haney guides the reader through extended discussions of Coleridge's work and thought as such, and as a result, Coleridge becomes a substantive voice, a recognizable voice. Unfortunately, in much of the earlier chapters, it is contemporary critical theory, only occasionally foiled by scattered bits of Coleridge's terminology and concepts that overwhelmingly predominates. Thus the conversation sometimes ignores Coleridge outright, and more often reduces his inclusion to just another source of terminology.

Haney recognizes the narrow, and highly technical, character of the book, and the correlatively probable, "relatively small [audience] of professors and graduate students" (xi) for the book. As such, individual chapters read separately may be very useful in granting those students and professors a look at how 20th-century hermeneutic and ethical critical theory handles 18th- and 19th-century romantic texts, and grant them a hermeneutical-critical introduction to Coleridge's work. But in fact, what is missing from Haney's treatment of Coleridge is to address the very matter that his title announces - ethics of interpretation - in reference to his project itself. We should ask, not merely if contemporary theory is applicable to Coleridge's work, and vice versa, but also whether we should apply contemporary theory to Coleridge and vice versa. Asking this question may, if anything, encourage the reader to consult Coleridge himself on the matter.

Read Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, The Friend, The Stateman, and his poetry for direct access to his best thoughts--and by and large the intelligent reader should not need the academic filters. If you want scholars who try, and largely succeed, in taking Coleridge on his own terms, try first Basil Wiley's biography, then Barfield's What Coleridge Thought, and then for deeper waters, Mary Ann Perkin's Coleridge's Philosophy. Only then should you come back to such works as Prof. Haney's to see how much richer Coleridge's philosophy is than anything available among our contemporaries--including, with all due respect, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Levinas, etc.