Ending in Mere Nothingism: Pantisocracy to Idealism

In the Biographia Literaria Samuel Taylor Coleridge cites his ‘Satyrane's Letters’, recording his voyage from England to Germany of 1798, which was marred by anticlimax. Coleridge explains: ‘I had associated such an immensity with the ocean, that I felt exceedingly disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon’ (Coleridge 1983: 2.169).

This sense of being hemmed in by the sea is familiar from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In his letters, the ideological underpinnings of the feeling of confinement become apparent. Coleridge had expected the sea to encompass infinitude, representing his hopes that Idealism would exceed the bounds of his early Pantisocracy and Hartleyan empiricism. But these traditions converge vertiginously; Coleridge's intellectual horizons – represented by the sea – prove narrower than he had hoped. Instead of representing disparate ideologies, the philosophical tensions of Coleridge's engagements at home anticipate those awaiting him in Germany. Such states of angst and unease, common in Coleridge's writings, have been interpreted ideologically since the 1980s, and connected to the historical transition from revolutionary to bourgeois epochs. Changes in the social body alter Coleridge's sense of his own private body. I suggest that Coleridge's inner tensions draw on the strains between individuals and the social body in the social contract tradition.

Coleridge often describes the individual and social bodies as closely interrelated, linking personal distemper to social unrest. In his letters, he writes to John Morgan that his opium addiction has the effect of severing him internally, finally pushing him away from the social body:

Opium fragments the individual into disparate fractions, so that Coleridge's legislative and executive functions (to which he refers as ‘the will’ and the ‘volition’) are separated – like the parts of Rousseau's general will. Coleridge describes opium addiction to Lord Byron ‘as a specific madness which leaving the intellect uninjured and exciting the moral feelings to a cruel sensibility entirely suspended the moral will’ (Coleridge 2002: 4.626).