Abstract
Chapter 4 “Sublime Disintegration” explores Coleridge’s anthology of the aphorisms of Archbishop Leighton in his own Aids to Reflection (1825, AR). Among his several problems, Coleridge’s departure from his earlier view of the symbol in Statesman’s Manual prevents his imitating the intuitive, “silvery-grey” tone of Leighton’s writing. Instead, his sublime rhetoric in AR aims at presenting his Ideas. It relies on two rhetorical figures: negative definition that defines articles of belief only by what they are not, and “indifference,” clusters of reliable but contradictory statements concerning doctrine that will never coalesce. A long crux in AR on the idea of redemption provides an apt example. Chapter 4 also focuses on Aesthetic Theory by Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), whose genealogy of the sublime moves from Kant and the Romantics to modern art. Here the “sublime ultimately reverses into its opposite”: what a fallen theology has become in modern art. Adorno’s thoroughgoing rejection of symbolism, “the unity of the universal and the particular,” retrospectively clarifies Coleridge’s more gradual departure from the symbolism of Statesman’s Manual. Reading Coleridge’s depiction of the sublime Gothic cathedral in his 1818 lectures, moreover, illuminates Adorno’s elusive idea of truth content in art, discovered by participants’ “shudder,” a dispersive shattering of self in order to reach the artwork.
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Notes
- 1.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1971), CL I 354. (Cited parenthetically in text as CL I plus page number).
- 2.
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 198. (Cited as AT.)
- 3.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer, Bollingen Series LXXV 9 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 534. (Cited as AR.)
- 4.
When it comes to Coleridge’s use of capitals—for Idea, Reason, Church, State, etc.—I will use the upper case in my prose only to distinguish Coleridge’s sense from the general one. Where the context makes clear that Coleridge’s sense is meant, I will drop the upper case.
- 5.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Table Talk, Recorded by Henry Nelson Coleridge (and John Taylor Coleridge), vol. 2, ed. Carl Woodring, Bollingen Series LXXV 14 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), II 371. (Cited as TT.)
- 6.
Coleridge is citing Romans 8:26 (Authorized Version).
- 7.
Romans 8:16 (Authorized Version).
- 8.
Some of this material resembles the first existing chapter of Thomas McFarland’s Fragment 1 of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Opus Maximum, ed. Thomas McFarland, with the assistance of Nicholas Halmi, Bollingen Series LXXV 15 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 5–11. (Cited as OM.)
- 9.
H.J. Jackson, “Coleridge’s Lessons in Transition: The ‘Logic’ of the ‘Wildest Odes,’” in Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 855; James D. Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 9.
- 10.
Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8.
- 11.
Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 17.
- 12.
Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 182. Hedley is citing AR 40, 38.
- 13.
Many Christian traditions have found the doctrine of “imputed righteousness” in Romans 4:18–24 where Abraham “against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations.” Abraham was “not weak in faith,” although “he was about an hundred years old.” So “it was imputed to him for righteousness.” To St Paul’s readers also faith “shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification” (Authorized Version). Another example of the doctrine is John Bunyan, Justification by An Imputed Righteousness; Or, No Way to Heaven But by Jesus Christ, in The Works of John Bunyan, ed. George Offor, https://www.biblesnet.com/John%20Bunyan%20Justification%20by%20an%20Imputed%20Righteousness.pdf. Coleridge cites in similar vein from Leighton concerning the believer who has a “Righteousness … that is not in him, but upon him. He is clothed with it” (AR 114).
- 14.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, Bollingen Series L, vol. 4 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 5210. (Cited as CN IV.)
- 15.
Coleridge repeats a version of this passage later in AR (250–51).
- 16.
I distinguish between “negative proof,” an umbrella term for figures that variously withhold positive meaning by negation, and negative definition, one device of negative proof, that defines what something is not.
- 17.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson, and J. R. de J. Jackson, Bollingen Series LXXV 11, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), I 787. (Cited as SW&F.)
- 18.
Murray J. Evans, Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 125. (Cited as SC.)
- 19.
Conscience is a major topic of OM (SC 63–94). On its linkage to reason, Coleridge states that it is “the true ultimate why and wherefore of [everything] within the sphere of morals and the practical reason” (OM 60). Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, 165 calls conscience “reason in its aspect of will.”
- 20.
John Beer regards this moment of this transition for the reader of AR as a situation of some perplexity for Coleridge, who had initially expected it to be “a simple ‘through the looking-glass’ transition” from “the standpoint of one who had made that crossing” (AR lxxiii).
- 21.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Bollingen Series LXXV 7, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), II 122–23. (Cited as BL.)
- 22.
AT, 94 and n. 15. This chapter discusses Adorno’s critique of intuitability in relation to Coleridge below.
- 23.
In Sublime Coleridge (52–60), I sometimes took a more sanguine view of contemplating the idea, related to passages from BL and the Lectures 1818–1819: On the History of Philosophy, i.e., from texts prior to the 1820s. These texts often still retained a view of symbol more beholden to Coleridge’s earlier view, which suggested more ready access to his ideas: in his description of a painting, “The Triumph of Death,” “from all the laws of drawing, all the absence of color … it was one mighty idea that spoke to you, everywhere the same … the presence of an idea acting, of that which was not formed,” through “the adoption of a symbol” (Lects 1818–1819 I 196). The evidence of this study more supports the view that “[a]t best, Coleridge’s appeals to the Idea are at the sublime limits of conceptual containment” (SC 57).
- 24.
I extract this commentary on thesis, antithesis, and mesothesis or indifference from the fuller gambit of Coleridge’s pentad (including prothesis and synthesis), influenced by Pythagoras, as discussed in SC 21–22, 98–104, and passim.
- 25.
I extract these comments on indifference from Coleridge’s mention also of two other positions in his pentad, synthesis and prothesis (SC 99–100).
- 26.
Discussion in Chap. 6 will highlight a more explicit connection between the topics of items 2 and 3 in the crux: the Absolute and symbol.
- 27.
βυβος αβυβος is a “mistake for ‘βυθός ἄβυσσος,’ ‘bottomless abyss’” (OM 232 note c).
- 28.
Nicholas Reid, Coleridge, Form and Symbol: Or the Ascertaining Vision (London: Ashgate Press, 2005), 130.
- 29.
OM 232–33 is a compressed version of the “Divine Idea” of the “venerable Tetractys” (OM 211, 209). SC 95–130 discusses the amplified version in OM 192–213.
- 30.
AR 335. By a previous comment (334), Coleridge indicates that this scholium is an answer to a previous question and answer “III” (332). The answer there reads: “The Effect caused [by redemption] is—the being born anew: as before in the flesh to the World, so now born in the spirit to Christ.” This metaphor thus uses something familiar (birth) to clarify something less familiar (birth in the spirit). Confusingly, Coleridge uses the same idea of spiritual birth in his example for analogy/symbol, in his view the opposite of metaphor. Both the confusion and the distinction remain.
- 31.
The contrast between Coleridge’s sublime discourse in AR and symbolic discourse, signalled by the metaphor of taste in his diction here, does not preclude that his sublime discourse can awaken desire in his readers. I return to this point at the end of this chapter, regarding the rhetorical attraction of opposites.
- 32.
Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 30 comments on the danger that Coleridge’s opposites might collapse into one another.
- 33.
Raimonda Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Press, 1985), 115. Here and elsewhere in this monograph, I am indebted to Modiano in my references to the indefinite vastness of Coleridge’s sublime.
- 34.
Christopher Stokes, Coleridge, Language and the Sublime: From Transcendence to Finitude (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 144–45, 135–36. The pertinent fragments are “Definition of Aesthetic Terms” and “On the Distinction Between the Picturesque and the Sublime’” (SW&F I 350–52, 352–53). I cite from another version of these fragments TT II 370–71. Editor Carl Woodring regards Thomas Allsop’s dating of this version, “Spring 1821,” as unreliable (TT II 367, 353). The Allsop version of the definition of the sublime per se that I cite immediately in this paragraph is virtually identical to the version Stokes cites in his analysis.
- 35.
Stokes, Coleridge, Language, 136.
- 36.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, Bollingen Series LXXV 4, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), I 514. (Cited as F I.)
- 37.
Stokes, Coleridge, Language, 145–47, 135.
- 38.
John 1:4, 9: “In him was life; and the life was the light of men …. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (Authorized Version).
- 39.
Stokes, Coleridge, Language, 148.
- 40.
Reid, Coleridge, Form, 4.
- 41.
Reid, Coleridge, Form, 27. The brackets in the following quotation are Reid’s.
- 42.
Reid, Coleridge, Form, 37; Nicholas Reid, “Coleridge and Schelling: The Missing Transcendental Deduction,” Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994), 472, 477, drawing on the OM manuscript corresponding to OM 196, 199–200.
- 43.
Peter Cheyne, Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), “Introduction,” first par.; “Introduction”: “What Is Reason, and What Are Its ‘Ideas’?,” final par., Kindle. Here and for other Kindle books without stable page numbers, I cite other identifiers, including chapter/essay titles plus section titles and/or par. numbers.
- 44.
Anne C. McCarthy, Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 9.
- 45.
McCarthy, Awful Parenthesis, 33.
- 46.
McCarthy, Awful Parenthesis, 84.
- 47.
McCarthy, Awful Parenthesis, 8, 84.
- 48.
Coleridge’s distinctions among symbol, indifference, and sublime in his later major prose can also add focus to comments in Philip Shaw, The Sublime, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 121. Coleridge’s earlier allegiance to symbol regarding “objects of sense as symbolic of the eternal” can now appear to be a stage, rather than a view “conveyed throughout” his works. The “allness” of his sublime, moreover, “[w]here neither whole nor parts,”—associated as it now appears with negative definition and indifference—is distinct from Coleridge’s earlier symbol.
- 49.
Jerome C. Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 209.
- 50.
Christensen, Blessed Machine, 209.
- 51.
Christensen, Blessed Machine, 215, 216.
- 52.
Christensen, Blessed Machine, 209, 215, 216.
- 53.
SC 139, paraphrasing Christensen, Blessed Machine, 217.
- 54.
Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, 175; SC 34.
- 55.
Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 340–41. The close relationship between polarity and Coleridge’s version of Pythagoras’s pentad is evident throughout Coleridge’s Sublime Later Prose. In my discussion of AR 178*–83, for example, they explicitly come together in his definition of ideas: “[e]very Line may be, and by the ancient Geometricians was, considered as a point produced, the two extremes being its poles, while the Point itself remains in, or at least represented by, the midpoint, the Indifference of the two poles … named Thesis and Antithesis” (179*).
- 56.
Ross Wilson, Theodor Adorno (London: Routledge, 2007), 3.
- 57.
Albert Wellmer, “Adorno, Modernity, and the Sublime (1991),” in Albrecht Wellmer, Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity. Essays and Lectures, tr. David Midgley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 158–62 proposes aspects of another genealogy of Adorno’s sublime.
- 58.
Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, “Editors’ Afterword,” in AT 364. Adorno and Tiedemann provide no information on Theodor Adorno’s correspondence from which they quote.
- 59.
Shierry Weber Nicholsen, “Toward a More Adequate Reception of Adorno’s ‘Aesthetic Theory’: Configurational Form in Adorno’s Aesthetic Writings,” Cultural Critique, No. 18 (Spring, 1991), 59.
- 60.
Alison Stone, “Adorno and Logic,” in Deborah Cook, ed., Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts (2008; Routledge: New York, 2014), 59 n. 25.
- 61.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (1991, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 376–412.
- 62.
Adorno is often not clear on which stage of the sublime he is discussing. My phrase “subsequent developments in the nineteenth century” is, I think, a fair inference for events after the Romantics (e.g., the fall of theology) and before modern art, which includes Kafka and Beckett. I discuss this unclarity of Adorno’s sublime discourse below.
- 63.
Immanuel Kant, “B. Of the Dynamically Sublime in Nature,” “Second Book. Analytic of the Sublime,” “Critique of Judgment,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989), 266.
- 64.
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetics: 1958/59, ed. Eberhard Ortland and trans. Wieland Hoban (2009; Cambridge UK: Polity, 2018), 27.
- 65.
Adorno, Aesthetics, 29.
- 66.
Adorno, Aesthetics, 35.
- 67.
Martin Jay, “Adorno and the Role of Sublimation in Artistic Creativity and Cultural Redemption,” New German Critique 143, vol. 48, no. 2 (August 2021), 81, 70, DOI 10.1215/0094033X-8989246, Duke University Press.
- 68.
As is often the case in AT, Adorno’s historical markers are absent or vague. I have tried to make some sense of his allusive sketch in this passage of musical history from Haydn to Debussy.
- 69.
Adorno’s diction in context indicates that he means works of modern art, although he does not make this explicit.
- 70.
Hohendahl, Fleeting Promise, 72–73.
- 71.
Adorno, Aesthetics, 33, 45.
- 72.
Adorno, Aesthetics, 45; AT 198.
- 73.
Adorno, Aesthetics, 46.
- 74.
Brian O’Connor, “Philosophy of History,” in Cook, Theodor Adorno, 183. O’Connor is citing Theodor Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–65, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (2001; Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 91. “[H]istory alone,” moreover, prevents the artwork “from being merely something posited or manufactured” (AT 133).
- 75.
Hohendahl, Fleeting Promise, 73.
- 76.
Hohendahl, Fleeting Promise, 21.
- 77.
Hohendahl, Fleeting Promise, 22.
- 78.
Ross Wilson, “Aesthetics” in Cook, Theodor Adorno, 154, emphasis added.
- 79.
Hohendahl, Fleeting Promise, 22, 73.
- 80.
AT 131–32; 85 qtd. by Hohendahl, Fleeting Promise, 64; AT 133 qtd. by Hohendahl, 71; Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 133 qtd. in Hohendahl, 72. The terms of reference of these passages are most likely from Christian theology. But distinguishing it from “messianic Judaism” as sources for Adorno’s “figure of redemption” (Hohendahl 78) is not always straightforward. Helpful on the topic of Adorno’s messianism are John Hughes, “Unspeakable Utopia: Art and the Return to the Theological in the Marxism of Adorno and Horkheimer,” Cross Currents 53 (Winter 2004), 475–92, ProQuest; and Christopher Craig Brittain, Adorno and Theology (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 129–39, ProQuest Ebook Central.
- 81.
Hohendahl, Fleeting Promise, 73.
- 82.
Adorno, Aesthetics, 39–40.
- 83.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (1967; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 34.
- 84.
Michael Marder, “Minima Patientia: Reflections on the Subject of Suffering,” New German Critique 97, Vol. 33.1 (Winter 2006), 71, https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2005-005, Duke University Press; Robert Kaufman, “Poetry’s Ethics: Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion,” New German Critique 97, Vol. 33.1 (Winter 2006), 113, https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2005-006, Duke University Press.
- 85.
Fabian Freyenhagen, “Moral Philosophy,” in Cook, Theodor Adorno, 109 identifies an ethical underpinning for Adorno’s idea of “barbaric” poetry: his “new categorical imperative”, namely, “to arrange our thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” Freyenhagen is citing Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (1966; London: Routledge, 2000), 365 with some modification of translation in context.
- 86.
In this paragraph, I cite Richter’s own translated version of aphorism 153, in Gerhard Richter, “Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth Content in Adorno,” New German Critique 97, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Winter 2006), 126–27, https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2005-007, Duke University Press. He proposes corrections to the standard English translation in Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Refections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (1951; London: Verso, 2005), 247. For example, he translates the title (“Zum Ende”) as “Toward the End” rather than as “Finale” in Adorno, Minima Moralia, 247.
- 87.
Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 250–51.
- 88.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying To Understand Endgame,” in Adorno, Notes to Literature, 251, emphasis added.
- 89.
Adorno, “Trying,” 252.
- 90.
Adorno, “Trying,” 251, 248.
- 91.
AT 62; Hohendahl, Fleeting Promise, 72–73.
- 92.
Robert Kaufman, “Poetry’s Ethics?,” 115.
- 93.
Morton D. Paley, Coleridge’s Later Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) explores what may well be a parallel process, beginning later in the first decade of the 1800s, in which “the appropriate tropes are … simile rather than metaphor, personification rather than synecdoche; the mode of signification is typically allegory rather than symbolism” (40, emphasis added).
- 94.
In this review of symbol, I use material from SC 55–56.
- 95.
Nicholas Halmi in OM xix–xx, 5, 80, 214, and 291 provides 1819–23 as probable dates for the four large “Fragments” of OM.
- 96.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer, Bollingen Series LXXV 10 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 47*.
- 97.
Modiano, Coleridge and Nature, 67. In a related vein, Nicholas Reid, “Why we need the Opus Maximum to understand the Coleridgean Symbol,” in “A Panel of Papers on the Opus Maximum,” moderated by Murray Evans, The Coleridge Bulletin New Series 38 (NS) (Winter 2011), 99 also suggests that in “his later years, Coleridge had a darker view of the human imagination and natural symbols, arguing that they were to some extent corrupted by their origins in the Fall.” He develops this argument in “The Satanic Principle in the Later Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination,” Studies in Romanticism, 37 (Summer 1998), 259–77. Nicholas Halmi, “Coleridge on Allegory and Symbol,” in Frederick Burwick, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 345–58 provides a very useful overview of Coleridge on symbol.
- 98.
Nicholas Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) offers an important critique of the theological valence of Coleridge’s symbol as applied to his whole works.
- 99.
“Concrete” or its cognates occur 94 times in AT (excepting the “Editors’ Afterword”). “Nonsensuous” and “concrete” appear to be other ways for Adorno to evoke “truth content,” expressed as it is by semblance but also independent from it (284).
- 100.
Kant, “B. Of the Dynamically Sublime,” 266.
- 101.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, Bollingen Series LXXV 5, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), II 79. (Cited as Lects 1808–1819.)
- 102.
Modiano, Coleridge and Nature, 122. Late in the quotation, Modiano cites Albert O. Wlecke, Wordsworth and the Sublime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 84.
- 103.
Hohendahl, Fleeting Promise, 22; Wilson, “Aesthetics,” 154.
- 104.
By coincidence, Coleridge also mentions “petrifaction,” stating that the cathedral is “the petrifaction of our religion” (Lects 1808–1819 II 60). He thus implies that the beholder’s “becom[ing], as it were, a part of the work contemplated” involves her identification with the religious elements of the scene. I have discussed this scene at length in Chap. 2.
- 105.
Espen Hammer, “Metaphysics,” in Cook, Theodor Adorno, 70.
- 106.
Ståle Finke, “Between Ontology and Epistemology,” in Cook, Theodor Adorno, 93.
- 107.
Robert Kaufman, “Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity,” in Tom Huhn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), par. 19 (begins “All this indicates why …”), emphasis added.
- 108.
Hohendahl, Fleeting Promise, 73.
- 109.
Hohendahl, Fleeting Promise, 24.
- 110.
Adorno’s comment here echoes his critique of intransigent human reason in his and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.
- 111.
Adorno, “Trying,” 245.
- 112.
Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 269.
- 113.
Adorno, Aesthetics, 38.
- 114.
Also cited by Jay, “Adorno and Sublimation,” 70.
- 115.
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Trancendence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 23.
- 116.
Adorno, Aesthetics, 38, emphasis added.
- 117.
Richter, “Aesthetic Theory,” 126.
- 118.
Adorno, “Trying,” 251, 245.
- 119.
Adorno, “Trying,” 255.
- 120.
Hullot-Kentor, “Translator’s Introduction,” in AT, xiv.
- 121.
Hullot-Kentor is translating from the German in Theodor W. Adorno, “Auf die Frage: Was ist deutsch,” in Gesammelte Schriften 10. 2 (Frankfurt, 1977), 698.
- 122.
Hullot-Kentor, translating from the German in Adorno, “Auf die Frage,” 693.
- 123.
Modiano, Coleridge and Nature, 115.
- 124.
Modiano, Coleridge and Nature, 84.
- 125.
Coleridge’s inflection of the sublime encounter in the 1818 lectures in religious language—“self-annihilation” and being “filled with devotion and with awe” (Lects 1808–1819 60 and n. 44, 79)—communicates with his evident goal in AR that readers make the transition from moral to spiritual religion. Adorno’s non-religious theology of truth content means readers to persevere, through shudder.
- 126.
Richter, “Aesthetic Theory.” 126.
- 127.
Marianne Tettlebaum, “Political Philosophy,” in Cook, Theodor Adorno, 144.
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Evans, M.J. (2023). Sublime Disintegration: Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1825) and Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970). In: Coleridge’s Sublime Later Prose and Recent Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25527-4_4
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