David Haney. The Challenge of Coleridge. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 1999. ISBN 0271020512. Price: US$55.00.

Peter Larkin, at the 2002 Coleridge conference in Somerset, spoke warmly of David Haney’s The Challenge of Coleridge as an exemplary contribution to recent debate within the hermeneutical community, and it is not hard to see why. It is a comprehensive and erudite reading of the ethical dimension of Coleridge’s thought, and one which is written with a certain kind of clarity. And it contributes to one of the central problems of post-structural discourse over the last fifteen years or so: the problem of how (if indeed it is possible) to bring an ethical dimension into a discourse which in its earlier phases was marked by an all-corrosive scepticism. But I am less sure exactly what it contributes to that discussion, a reservation which will emerge in the course of this review. The first chapter deals, appropriately enough, with the very question of whether ethics and hermeneutics can meet. As Haney points out, borrowing Harpham’s analysis: The question, then, was how to bring ethics back into hermeneutics, a question which is closely related to Hume’s problem of how to get an ought from an is. As the Oxford Companion to Philosophy suggests, the usual response is to try to argue that ought and is interpenetrate (419)—a strategy Barbara Hernstein Smith adopts in her argument that all interpretation (or attention to the world) is value laden. But the problem here is, of course, that the values spoken of are not necessarily ethical. The male gaze, for instance, is certainly evaluative, but much less certainly ethical. Haney thus prefers to argue that “there does seem to be an unavoidable ethical element in the hermeneutic act: a demand for a certain generosity toward the other,” an idea he takes further by referring to Aristotle’s view that speech often involves “a kind of communality[,] in virtue of which reciprocal taking of counsel [. . .] is at all meaningful in the first place” (7). This sounds like a version of what Anglo-American philosophy calls “epistemic charity”: a willingness, for instance, to interpret a passage so as to render it coherent with the text’s presumed broader purposes. But if this is the note on which Haney ends his introductory discussion of the problem, it is not easy to see how we have got beyond his earlier warning that it is “a mistake to see interpretative activity as fundamentally ethical” (3). For when Derrida accused Gadamer of depending on a Kantian concept of “good will” in his hermeneutics, Gadamer replied that hermeneutic understanding is ethically neutral. It has “nothing to do with ethics,” Gadamer said, because “even immoral beings try to understand one another” (3). This is not a conclusion Haney can rest content with, and Haney suggests that “even evil doers must listen to each other generously if they are to work together” (7). That claim is open to some question. And so I take the argument to have shown that hermeneutics often will be characterised by an ethical impulse, even if of no greater significance than a common epistemic charity. But in the absence of metaphysics or foundations, I am still left wondering what the status of this ethical impulse might be and whether it is really consonant with the hermeneutical approach. In the remainder of his first chapter, Haney does not answer these question but moves instead to a criticism of New Historicism for what he sees as its too easy assumption that “history can simply be reconstructed in its original form”—the Schleiermacherian or Romantic position (12). The critique is interesting in its own right but also a necessary means by which …