The Λόγος in the Logic

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As early as 1803 Coleridge told people he was planning a book-length treatise on logic, although it wasn't until the 1820s that he actually began drafting the work. What he produced was based on a set of Thursday evening classes, or discussion sessions, he ran for a group of eager young (male) acolytes 1822-23. By dictating his thoughts to a number of different amanuenses most of a book emerged. Coleridge offered this, in a more or less desultory way, to several publishers in the later 1820s, none of whom were interested, and it seems that without the pressure of a publication deadline he couldn't summon the impetus actually to finish the whole. He planned a four-part work comprising: a lengthy introduction on the topic of logic as such, a section on the syllogism and structures of logic; a section on ‘the Criterion or Dialectic’ and a final section on what Coleridge calls ‘Noetic’ logic, covering after a fashion the practical application of logic, logic-in-action, logic-in-actual-thought (νόος). This last section remained unwritten, and the three-quarters we have, since STC never actually readied them for publication, make for clogged and difficult reading.

Not to beat around the bush, Logic is by far the most boring thing Coleridge ever wrote: repetitious, very often obscure, digressive, interminable. It doesn't help that the text comes to us, as it were, pre-motheaten: full of holes where his amanuenses (one of whom at least doesn't seem to have had Greek—quite the problem if one is taking dictation from Coleridge) didn't understand or feel confident about a word, a technical term or a phrase and so just left a gap. Modern editors have made educated guesses to fill some, but not all, of these. And, yes: Coleridge's actual history of publication makes it look naive of me to imply that revising all this for publication would have involved him smoothing out all obscurity and digression. The triumph of scholarly hope over experience, that. Still: the work as have it is a more-or-less indigestible lump.

After his death the manuscript of the Logic seems to have simply nonplussed his literary executor, Joseph Henry Green, who made no effort to publish it. At the end of the century Charles Ward, working for Macmillan, heard rumours that a book-length unpublished Coleridge manuscript was knocking around, acquired it and sent it to Oxford for a report on how to ready it for possible publication. He later recollected that the MS came back to him after three months ‘without a single word of comment from anybody, either combative or appreciative’ [‘Coleridge’, Athenaeum, 26 October 1895]. A whole other century passed before the work actually saw the light of day, as part of the Bollingen edition of the complete Coleridge in 1981, edited by J R de J Jackson. Excitement in Coleridge circles about a brand new book-length STC work finally seeing the light of day quickly became disappointment at just how turgid and baffling the Logic actually is.

And there's one more problem. Having myself now waded all the way across this river of treacle I can confirm what previously scholars have already noted: almost all of the Logic is just Kant, either summaries of, or lengthy passages translated directly from, the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena, titivated only a very little by the addition of occasional illustrative examples from STC's own ambit. Perhaps Coleridge believed such summary and excerpting useful in their own right (Francis Haywood's first English translation of the Critique did not appear until 1838, after all) but it renders the book superfluous to any reader who knows Kant, and the summaries are neither systematically laid-out or, it has to be said, attributed. This latter point is the old problem of whether we're dealing with sloppiness or conscious plagiary on Coleridge's part, a problem never very far away where this author is concerned. ‘There is a danger,’ J R Jackson says with a nice dryness of tone, ‘that readers unfamiliar with his sources may mistake vintage Kant for vintage Coleridge’ [Jackson, lvi]. Reader, beware.

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For a number of reasons, Murray J Evans brackets the Logic with another of Coleridge's unfinished big, late-career books, the Opus Maximum (also sometimes called the Logosophia):

First, they are roughly contemporaneous, with Logic likely written across the 1820s and most of Opus Maximum in the period 1819-23. Second, both texts were draft texts, not published in Coleridge's lifetime; both only first appeared in the Bollingen editions in the last thirty years, Logic in 1981 and Opus Maximum in 2002. Finally, judging by the sparse extant scholarship, the texts have attracted very few modern readers, relative to readers of the Biographia Literaria for example. This is only partly for reasons of late publication, since they are both difficult texts. The Logic is an apparently dry treatise on an apparently unimaginative topic, and Opus Maximum resists wholistic reading. [Evans, ‘Coleridge as Thinker: Logic and Opus Maximum’, in Frederick Burwick (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford University Press 2009), 323]

Evans—author of the world's only monograph on the Opus Maximum, the fascinating Sublime Coleridge: the Opus Maximum (Palgrave 2012)—naturally spends much more of his essay here on that other work. The Logic he reads as a preliminary to the Opus Maximum: ‘OM largely jumps off from what would have been Logic's missing Part 3 on the Noetic’ [326]. On the Logic itself, he agrees with Jackson, who insists that there is nothing new in the book at all. ‘The philosophical arguments of the Logic are often complex and subtle,’ is how Jackson puts it, but ‘the complexity and the subtlety are Kant's. Coleridge is a faithful interpreter of his master in the field of logic, and he does not at any point attempt to revise, refute or refine. He comments and explains, and he paraphrases and selects, but he does not offer new arguments’ [Jackson, lxii].

I don't think that's right, actually. Which is to say: whilst Coleridge certainly does spend most of his time here paraphrasing, commenting on and explaining Kant, he also argues something new; or, if that is perhaps a stretch, he at least gestures towards such an argument. It's not in the book's Part 2, which really is nothing more than summarised Kant; and it's not in Part 1 either, which is a rather confusingly assembled bundle of sections about what Coleridge calls ‘Pure Logic’ or ‘the Canon’. This Part 1 swamps, rather, what you might expect a book on logic to cover in a welter of discussion of other things. So for example: although Coleridge does include some discussion of the syllogistic forms (‘All men are mortal; Caius is a man; therefore Caius is mortal’ is one example he offers [1.1.4(a)]), he buries this in a lengthy discussion of how elements are separated off from the universal into the particular, calling the apprehension of the former ‘the act of clusion’ and the latter ‘the act of seclusion’ [1.2.2]. And he's very interested in the idea that the subject and object of a sentence are always separate things, except in the single instance of the utterance I am, where the subjective ‘I’ and the objective ‘am’ unite into a single form. Which is all very interesting I'm sure.

Really, STC's emphasis here reflects the fact that he just wasn't very interested in the forms of the syllogism. In a conversation recorded in the Table Talk [23 Sept 1830] he scoffed at those logicians who could ‘spin ... ten or a dozen pages’ out of the varieties of syllogistic logic (‘all those absurd forms of syllogism are one half pure sophisms, and the other half mere forms of rhetoric’). The Logic itself copies a few illustrative syllogisms out of Kant, and touches on the importance of avoiding post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking, but otherwise this is a book that considers the formal structures of logical thinking more-or-less simple and self-evident. The clusion/seculsion thing, on the other hand, speaks more directly to Coleridge's concerns, because he is so fascinated, as a poet as well as a thinker, by the relation of the particular experience to the whole:—the relationship, that is, of individual subjectivity to the collective and to the divine. The One and the Many. This relationship is dialectical in that it runs in mutually engaging ways. On the one hand, Coleridge insists that logic is exclusively concerned with what he calls ‘derived’ perception: the way our minds combine and coalesce variegated perceptions into a mental unity. On the other hand, Coleridge again reverts to one of his perennial concerns: the fragmentary and isolated individual consciousness and its relationship to (divine) unity. This (if I'm reading the Logic right) has its formal-logical aspect, because syllogisms require the separation of individuated particulars—as it might be, our friend Caius, aforementioned—from generalities—‘all men’, or ‘mankind’ or whatever—such that logical syllogisms formally embody the division of the individuality of separate subjectivity from the unity of collective existence.

Coleridge is especially interested in the way this separation relates to the semantic structures of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ as they manifest in both sentences and in our mental structures for understanding the universe. The fullest subject, for Coleridge, is a whole human subjectivity, and the fullest object is the entire universe; and the structures of language depend upon the separation of subject from object. This, Coleridge seems to be arguing in Part 1 of the Logic, has to do with the way syllogism and clusion/seclusion invoke opposition as a structuring principle of syllogistic logic. I'm not sure about my reading here, though I think it's right. I think it underlies, for instance, passages like these:

In the first act [of perception] we have seen that a principle of unity is contributed by the mind itself. But if there be a uniting power, there must be that which is to be the subject or matter of the union, and by what name shall we designate this latter? The opposite to one is the many ... the external, the immediately sensuous, the supposed impressions from external agents are comprised under the common term of ‘the many’, ‘the manifold’, or ‘multeity’, or ‘the indistinguishable’ (to which we may add the phrases adopted by symbolical writers or mystics, viz. ‘chaos’, ‘the waters’, etc etc) [Logic, 1.2.19]

If you are tempted, as I was on reading this, to say: ‘but why should the opposite to one be the many? Mightn't it be the none?’ then Coleridge is ahead of you. He insists several times in the Logic that ‘opposita semper unigena: there is no opposition between heterogeneous subjects’ [1.2.7], or at greater length: ‘opposita semper unigena; in omni oppositione datur suppositum in quo (seu, tenus quod) opposita unum sunt. Thesis = antithesis in aliqua prothesi’ [2.12.2], which means ‘oppositions are always of the same genera; in every opposition a supposition is given in which (or insofar as which) opposites are unified. Thesis = antithesis in some prothesis’. Coleridge himself glosses his own Latin thus: ‘terms that can be rightly opposed to each other’ (earlier he gives the example ‘north’ and ‘south’) ‘in their evolution of a truth must be identical in the root, that is, radically one. These are different ways of expressing the same principle, a principle of paramount importance in philosophy no less than in logic’ [2.12.2].

Now, none of this is original to Coleridge: it's from Kant's Prolegomena (and therefore ultimately from his Critique of Pure Reason), all except for the examples from ‘symbolical writers’, which give us some sense as to how Coleridge grasps his Kantian concepts: ‘chaos’, ‘the waters’, etc etc. But those examples are significant, I think. From Moses Mendelssohn's 1790 Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes (‘all legitimate syllogisms are grounded on a just analysis of conceptions’ [1.1.7]) Coleridge borrows the symbol of a tree, in order to illustrate the division of concepts into smaller constitutive concepts:

The total sum of human knowledge may be represented under the image of a tree, so as to convey in a just and lively manner the princple on which all formal logic rests. The outward points meet in sprays; these under in twigs; the twigs in boughs; the boughs in branches; and the branches in one common trunk. [Logic, 1.1.7]

But though it ends with this second-hand image, this chapters opens with an original Coleridgean portrait of the non-specific observing poet as a young man:

There are few who cannot recollect or place themselves in that state of mind in which their eye has rested either on a cloudless sky or the general aspect of the starry heavens or on a wide common bounded only by the horizon without consciously attending to any particular object or portion of the scene. There will be many too, I doubt not, not unwilling to confess that they have been sometimes in that state of mind which they could perhaps describe by no other term than that of thinking, and yet if questioned of what they were thinking about must answer nothing. Nay this is a state which not seldom takes place when the mind is preparing itself for the highest efforts of thought and even during such efforts the energy continuing during the momentary occultations of the part objects of the consciousness, as we continue the act of gazing in the brief intervals of the flashes at night in a storm of thunder and lightning. [Logic, 1.1.1]

Similarly, by way of illustrating Kant's conception that length and the lines that mark it are artefacts of our consciousness rather than objective elements ‘out there’ in the real world, here is Coleridge on flies, or ‘ephemerae’:

It was length without any necessity of abstracting from breadth or depth; in other words, it was a self-conscious act snatched away as is it were from the product of that act. The most exact but assuredly the most amusing mode of conveying what I mean, I have seen in the ephemerae and other minute and half-transparent insects who by the exceeding velocity of motion actually present to our eyes a symbol of what Plotinus meant when, speaking of the geometricians and the of Nature of acting geometrically, he says Θεωρουσα Θεωρηματα ποιει, her contemplative act is creative and is one with the product of their contemplation. [Logic, 1.2.15, quoting Enneads 3.8.4]

Coleridge then quotes accounts of swarms of emphemerae (‘emphemerae in jointed and articulated triangles of silver light’) by Réaumur, Kirby and Spence before adding:

I can add that I have twice seen the ascent of the ephemerae in strong moonlight, the beams passing through an opening in a branching tree that overhung the water on which the moonlight formed a small island in deepest shade, and here by intensely watching the phenomenon I satisfied myself that the different spiral figures were each produced by the image of motion which the single insect left on the eye; each of which overtook the preceding before the impression had ceased. [Logic, 1.2.16]

Nowadays we all know the technical term for this particular perceptual effect: the persistence of vision—and we know it because precisely this effect underpins the whole edifice of our visual culture from cinema to television and video gaming. There's no doubt in my mind that Coleridge, had he been born two centuries later than he was, would have been profoundly engaged by the domination of our cultural discourse by screen-displayed visual texts. The Logic includes a fascinating account of the way the kaleidoscope (brand-new tech this, invented by David Brewster in 1818) generates aesthetic beauty from ‘fragments, bits of coloured glass, a steel filing or two, ends of thread’. Put these elements in a ‘dice box’ and toss them on the table, Coleridge says, and you could ‘waste an hour or a week’ never forming any kind of beautiful figure; but put them in a kaleidoscopic tube and every twist of the end produces ‘some new and distinct form of beauty in endless succession, the number inexhaustible and all beautiful, though not all equally delightful’ [2.4.11(b)]. (Coleridge thinks the beauty comes from the addition of symmetry to these objects. I wonder if there's more to it than that).

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In all this, through Parts 1 and 2 of the incomplete Logic, Coleridge presents other people's ideas, and by ‘other people’ I mean Kant, mostly. But the Logic is not all Kant; and the bit that most substantively adds something new to Coleridge's Kantian summary is the Introduction.

This Intro is in two chapters, the first called ‘Sketch of the History of Logic’ (a chapter which in no way sketches the history of Logic) and the second titled ‘Chapter 1’, which suggests to me that Coleridge had decided on a do-over. In this latter chapter Coleridge derives the word, but also the concept, of logic from its Greek root in a way that is simultaneously perfectly conventional and  frankly eccentric-to-the-point-of-bonkers. Conventional, because after all, the word does indeed come via the Latin logica from the Ancient Greek λογικός (logikós ‘of or pertaining to speech or reason or reasoning, rational, reasonable’), and so from λόγος (lógos, ‘speech, reason’). But eccentric, because nobody before Coleridge, so far as I can see (and certainly not Kant) argued that logic is the formal manifestation in the sensible forms of our worldly intuition of the Johannine λόγος, that is Christ in the world and God substanding it and some spiritually holy third thing as well. But that's what we have here. This is how the second chapter of the introduction of the Logic, titled ‘Chapter 1’:

Logic from the Greek λέγω. The absolute etymon of this word, by which I mean the particular visual image, or other sensuous impression, which is at the root of its proper constitutive syllable, is far beyond historic research. [Logic, ‘Introduction’ 2:1]

He gives it a go, though, for eighteen dense pages, starting with the theory that ‘the initial λ’ of the word embodies ‘the sense of additional force, whether in consequence of a single energy or of the same energy repeated’, and a pendant dismissal of the theories of lexicographers that λ-words in Ancient Greek tended to express ‘feelings of disgust and hatred’ in favour of his own theory that λ represents ‘continuity and the absence of resistance’ [‘Intro’ 2.4]. From here, he goes via a etymological tracing of the meanings of λόγοι, ‘things weighed or considered’, ‘considerate, well-weighed, deliberate words’, to truthful and considered ‘histories’, as distinguished from the ἔπος (épos, ‘song, epic’) and ποιητής (poiētḗs, ‘creator, maker, author, poet’), since the latter invented rather than accurately recorded. ‘Thus,’ says Coleridge, ‘the derivatives from λόγος are now appropriated to men of superior knowledge, the highly informed, the men of understanding’ [‘Intro’ 2.15]. From here Coleridge leaves the lexicographers far behind to propose a triad of meanings. λόγος came to exist, he argues,

in a threefold relation: first it signified the logical faculty, the reasoning power, in short the understanding including the judgment, in distinction from the νοῦς or reason. Secondly it signified the understanding as a discursive faculty, or that which employed itself on the conceptions of the mind and the general terms representing them, in distinction from the intuition, or intuitive power of the mind, as employed on the forms of perception in time and space, that is, number and figure ... Thirdly λόγος was used in a somewhat larger sense as the mind or intellective power abstractedly from the νοῦς, or pure reason, as the supposed identity of the intellectio and the intelligibile; from the reason, I say, as at once the light of the mind and its highest object. [Logic, ‘Intro’ 2.20]

None of this is in Kant; it's all, so far as I can read it, Coleridge more-or-less tortuously bending the etymology of the word ‘logic’ round to fit it to his trinitarian conception of the λόγος of John 1.1. The identity of the intellectio, or intellect, with the intelligibile, or intelligible reality, happens (Coleridge argues) in one place only, the ‘I am’ that unites subject and object in one objective subjectivity, and which in the Biographia and elsewhere (though not here) he connects to the pronouncement God makes to Moses in Exodus 3:14: I AM THAT I AM. That's an absolutely central Biblical text to Coleridge's thought, that one. And this threefold definition of logic gives us (1) a structuring principle of the individual subjectivity, (2) the form of our engagement with the outside world (time and space) and therefore a structuring principle for our intersubjectivity, and (3) the ground of all such structures and subjectivities, the ‘highest object’ that provides the foundation for all particular iterations of mind, what he a little later calls ‘the sum of all the subjective comprehended in the name of mind or intelligence’ [‘Intro, 2.25’].

All this does at least explain, or it seems to me to do so, why STC's book on logic has so little truck with maths, syllogisms and, well, logic as the term is currently understood. The purpose of the exercise for him is not drily mathematical, but is rather the laying out of what he takes to be the divine structure of living consciousness, something (for him) in no way merely mechanical or material. It is the grammar of reality as such, and that grammar is divine. As Coleridge wrote elsewhere, probably in the late 18-teens, ‘the language of nature is a subordinate Logos, that was in the beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the thing represented’ [quoted in Prickett, Words and The Word (1986), 133]. Stephen Prickett is only one of a great many critics to note how core this λόγος is to Coleridge's aesthetics and metaphysics.

For Coleridge, the ‘Word’ is itself redolent of the hidden powers of meaning, at once latent and ‘living’ through tension with other apparently dissimilar notions ... The word [is] ‘bi-focal’. What is at one level operating below the threshold of consciousness in every act of perception, is also the power by which we create our ‘internal’ worlds. We perceive nature and create fictions by essentially the same process. But the languages of nature and of fiction interact ... The subordinate logos of nature is a repetition in the finite human mind of God's eternal act of creation. [Prickett, Words and The Word (1986), 143-44]

This is why Coleridge's Logic is such a strange work. Although all this commitment of the spiritual importance of the λόγος as the foundation of logic as such is not Kantian, Coleridge does believe that Kant is right about the way reality as such is structured by our apperceptions, which means that any Coleridgean Logic must entail a detailed summary of those Kantian ideas. There's no doubt in my mind that if Coleridge had gotten around to writing his final Part 3, it would have explored the action of the imagination, both secondary and primary, and would have had nothing to say about mathematically watertight sequential syllogisms.

This in turn explains a couple of the odder features of the Logic as they present to a modern-day reader. For one thing Coleridge throughout prioritises geometry over mathematics. Since nowadays both logic and geometry are seen as branches of what we nowadays tend to call, simply, mathematics, that might seem strange. In part this is just a matter of historical context. The Ancient Greeks had discovered lengths in geometry that they could not express as simple, or what are called ‘rational’, numbers, or even as the ratios of rational numbers: the length of the hypotenuse on a right-triangle where the other two sides are one unit long, for instance; or the relationship between a circle's diameter and its circumference. These lengths the Greeks called ‘irrational’, and on account of them they believed geometry and mathematics (which is to say, arithmetic) to be two quite different disciplines.

That was still, more or less, the intellectual world in which Coleridge was working. It wasn't until 1872 that Richard Dedekind showed that irrational numbers could indeed be defined in terms of rational numbers, and so in effect unified geometry and arithmetic; and it wasn't until 1910-13 that Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica proved that logic itself is mathematical and so brought all three disciplines under one umbrella. We can't blame Coleridge for not anticipating these giant steps of professional mathematicians, of course, although we may still be puzzled by his fondness for geometrical diagrams. Here, for instance, he illustrates his argument that ‘the verb substantive (“am”, sum, εἰμί) expresses the identity or coinherence of being and act’:

In this, ‘A = the point of identity’, which is, Coleridge assures us, generated by ‘perpetual eradiation [of] the line BC, the pole B representing being in its greatest predominance, and the pole C action in like manner’, while ‘a’ expresses ‘the indifference of being and action, of substantive and verb’ and ‘A’ is ‘the point of identity, is the verb and substantive in one and as one’ [‘Intro’, 1.20]. Clear? No? Try this one then:

The Λ there stands for λόγος and the Θ for θεωρία (theōría, ‘contemplation, speculation, a looking at, things looked at’, from θεωρέω ‘I look at, view, consider, examine’; Coleridge uses the word as shorthand for the perceptual understanding by which we engage with the world). N represents νοῦς, or pure reason, and E is the Eye, ‘as determining the chord connecting Λ and Θ; and we will also suppose that the eye is directed upward, from the chord to the centre’. Coleridge then glosses the diagram at exhausting, though not exhaustive, length: ‘the extracircumferential E, the power of acting on or from without, and the chord ΛΘ serve at once as the common boundary and medium of communication. Thus we have a view of the powers from which the sciences derive their name and character ... [with] N as representing the indemonstrable, because the ground of all demonstration, or the absolute, that is irrelative, because the ground of all relation (the consideration of which, as the primary truths—aeternae veritates—independent of all time and place and in which the reason itself consists’ [‘Intro’, 2.23(a)].

It's not entirely allergic of comprehension, all this, but more than the content of these quasi-mystical rebuses is their form. STC is explaining the structure of his whole book, Part 1 of which will cover Λ, Part 2 will cover Θ (via Kant) and the unwritten Part 3 would have covered N, as the ground of all relation. I suppose these diagrams don't exactly make things clearer for the general; although one thing they do is suggest strongly that Coleridge is pattern-making after the prototype of the Christian trinity. All these triangles. All these tripartite unities of ground, derivative and abstract, or reality, perception and unified-reality-perception, or Being, Action and Identity, or Father, Son and Spirit. What are they really about? They are Coleridge saying, as Kant nowhere does, that the logic according to which the world coheres and makes sense is just another name for God.

If we take the Johannine λόγος as Christ specifically (and I know, this is a very complicated topic, chewed-over by many generations of theologians, but for the sake of argument) then Coleridge's position here has some striking implications. Talking about the logic of Christ, or of Christ as the manifestation of logic in the world, might seem counterintuitive to the theological status of Christ as intercessor, the embodiment of forgiveness, redemption and so on. Does it make sense to describe Christ, as Coleridge does Logic, as ‘the science of the permanent relations in conceptions’ [‘Intro’ 2.23(a)]. I suppose that positing Christ as the underlying coherence and structure of reality is a way of saying that reality is fundamentally man-shaped. Not in terms of arms and legs, but in terms of love and lack, of care and connection, will and hope. The unwritten Part 3 might have made this plainer, and the Opus Maximum, with its addition of a divine Will to the conventional Christian trinity, perhaps goes some way towards following-through on all this.