Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stands tall within the cultural pantheon for his poetry. It’s much less well-known that in his personal lifetime, and within the a long time following his dying, this canonical poet had an equal fame as a thinker. His printed works containing a lot of his philosophical prose span from The Statesman’s Handbook (1816), which set out his concept of creativeness and symbolism; Biographia Literaria (1817), one of many nice and founding works of literary criticism; The Buddy (1818), which incorporates his philosophical ‘Essays on the Rules of Technique’; Aids to Reflection (1825), the place he expounds his spiritual philosophy of transcendence; and On the Structure of the Church and the State (1829), which presents his political philosophy.
The impact of these final two books was so spectacular that John Stuart Mill named Coleridge as one of many two nice British philosophers of the age – the opposite being Jeremy Bentham, Coleridge’s polar reverse. His pondering was additionally on the root of the Broad Church Anglican motion, a serious affect on F D Maurice’s Christian socialism, and the primary supply for American Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Coleridge in 1832, and John Dewey, the main pragmatist thinker, known as Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection ‘my first Bible’.
But philosophical fortunes change. The virtually-total eclipse of British idealism by the rise of analytic philosophy noticed a normal decline in Coleridge’s philosophical inventory. His philosophy languished whereas his verse rose. Coleridge’s poetry resonated with the psychedelia of the Nineteen Sixties and a normal cultural shift that emphasised the worth of the creativeness and a extra holistic view of the human place inside nature. Immediately, Coleridge is much extra typically remembered as a poet than a thinker. However his philosophy was spectacular in its originality and syntheses.
Though Coleridge wrote poetry all through his life, his energies more and more channelled in direction of philosophy. Drawing from neo-Platonism, the ingenious however troublesome transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, and the even obscurer intricacies of post-Kantians equivalent to J G Fichte and F W J Schelling, his philosophy was undoubtedly of the troublesome metaphysical sort, very a lot at odds with virtually minded British empiricism. Lord Byron spoke for a lot of when he described Coleridge:
Explaining Metaphysics to the nation –
I want he would clarify his Clarification.
But the British empiricism of John Locke, David Hume and David Hartley was itself at odds, Coleridge identified, with a deeper heritage of British thought. ‘Let England be,’ he pronounced, ‘Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Bacon, Harrington, Swift, Wordsworth’, who signify the idealising and proto-romantic custom that he recognized as ‘the religious platonic previous England’. Coleridge rallied that ‘religious platonic’ custom to oppose the philosophies of empiricists and hard-headed expounders of ‘common sense’ equivalent to Samuel Johnson, Erasmus Darwin, Hume, Joseph Priestley, William Paley and William Pitt, ‘with Locke on the head of the Philosophers and [Alexander] Pope of the Poets’.
Without denigrating industrial and industrial success, Coleridge argued that the haste for financial enchancment led to a decline in tradition, custom and religious wellbeing. Figuring out ‘civilisation’ with the forces of financial and technological development, and ‘cultivation’ with the deeper roots of religious connection, custom and permanence, he warned of manufacturing a society that was ‘varnished moderately than polished; perilously over-civilised, and most pitiably uncultivated!’ This concern with cultivation was an essential tenet in what Mill known as the ‘Germano-Coleridgian’ college, which examined what the empiricists, utilitarians and materialist mechanists tended to miss: the historic growth and the socially and psychologically vital meanings embedded in faith, custom and cultural symbolism.
Mill’s recognition of this distinction foreshadows what would change into the analytic-Continental divide between Anglophone philosophy, targeted on discrete evaluation meant to make clear issues, and the extra traditionally and theoretically formidable, synthesising approaches that started with these philosophers following Kant, equivalent to Schelling and G W F Hegel. This ‘Germano-Coleridgian’ method was in stark distinction to British utilitarianism, which lowered ethics to Bentham’s precept of utility. Within the tradition wars of his day, Coleridge championed cultural and religious issues, and opposed the moral elevation of sensual pleasure, and the discount of that and all the things else to base matter.
Coleridge equally sided with the supporters of the religious and transcendent in opposition to those that maintained the truth of the fabric and immanent solely. On this method, he took half within the ‘Pantheism Controversy’ that raged primarily throughout German philosophy within the late 18th and early nineteenth centuries. Coleridge argued for the transcendence of God moderately than holding, with Baruch Spinoza, that God is a completely immanent energy recognized with the pure world. Characteristically of Coleridge, nevertheless, he didn’t dismiss Spinozistic arguments, however adopted components of them to suit inside what he noticed as a wider complete. ‘Spinoza’s is … true philosophy,’ he wrote, ‘however it’s the Skeleton of the Reality.’ It wanted to be fleshed out in an effort to let ‘the dry Bones stay’.
Coleridge’s pondering offers a bridge between materialist and dynamic views within the sciences
This inclusive angle is likely one of the strengths of Coleridge’s method, which grew from his celebrated powers of synthesis. Seeing polarised debates as revealing an interdependent complete, he tried to embrace the views of his philosophical opponents, moderately than merely dismiss them. He noticed dichotomous or binary pondering (B versus C) as merely disputative, whereas a broader trichotomy (B versus C inside a broader unity of A) offered a unified complete as the upper ultimate that fierce but dependent polar opposition imperfectly represents. The view of a better union of opposites results in reasoning, whereas binary pondering leads merely to arguing.
Past the ‘cultivating’ deserves of Coleridgean synthesis, it’s additionally invaluable to delve into the content material of his philosophy. Over the previous 15 years, philosophers have been attending to what Anna Marmodoro calls ‘the metaphysics of powers’ and, since Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity and the later quantum concept, most philosophers and physicists agree that forces and fields of power are extra basic than matter, which is not held to be the atomistic ne plus extremely it was typically considered. Notably, Isaac Newton refused to scale back the power of gravitation to one thing that’s itself materials, leaving it as a type of darkish mysteries that we should merely observe and settle for with out totally understanding.
With out denying bodily matter, Coleridge contended in opposition to what he noticed as abject materialism, which lowered all qualities to amount and collapsed bodily forces into matter. On this level, historical past now sides with Coleridge in opposition to the materialists, and philosophers sympathetic with the intent of materialism now usually determine not with ‘materialism’ however with ‘physicalism’, or the view that the basic elements of the Universe are no matter physics will ultimately conclude they’re. Present pondering in quantum physics construes these parts as basic forces, which Coleridge himself argued.
An understanding of Coleridge’s pondering, then, offers perception into the beginnings of the analytic-Continental divide and a bridge between materialist and dynamic (powers-based) views within the sciences. It additionally illuminates Coleridge’s poetry because the expression of a unified view of the world not as mere matter clumping collectively in joyful coincidence, however because the evolution of the facility of concepts in a world of dynamically cast syntheses that resound again to the powers from which these inventive forces arose.
‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree …’ So begins Coleridge’s poem on the facility of phrases and creativeness in bodily and poetic creation. Echoing how the mighty potentate creates with an imperious fiat, the impressed poet, we’re advised, might ‘construct that dome in air’ in an explosively constructive fusion of opposites – ‘[t]hat sunny dome! these caves of ice!’ It’s a creation with extra astonishing magic than even the worldly energy of the Khan might muster:
And all ought to cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle spherical him thrice,
And shut your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drank the milk of Paradise.
Although unpublished until 1816, Kubla Khan was written between 1797 and 1799, round Coleridge’s annus mirabilis of 1797-98, when he additionally wrote his supernatural poem The Rime of the Historic Mariner, the daemonic Christabel, and a few of the best of what he known as his ‘Meditative Poems in Clean Verse’. A type of poems, the chic ‘Frost at Midnight’, describes the beauties of nature – ‘lakes and shores / And mountain crags’ – as incarnations of the divine phrase, being ‘The beautiful shapes and sounds intelligible / Of that everlasting language, which thy God / Utters’. That poem ends on the achingly lovely, mysterious word of ‘the key ministry of frost’ that can, if the evening will get colder, cling up the thaw-drops from the eaves ‘in silent icicles, / Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.’
Coleridge’s interconnecting themes are: the facility of the inventive phrase, in each worldly and poetic building, echoing the divine phrase; nature because the dwelling alphabet of God, solely dimly understood in human information; concepts as metaphysical essences and powers that pre-exist the bodily world; and the notion of the earthly reflecting the perfect, because the icicles shine to the moon, itself reflecting the in any other case unseen mild, at evening, of an unseen solar. These are all themes that Coleridge developed in his philosophical writings till his dying in 1834.
As a younger man, Coleridge drew a lot from David Hartley’s associationist concept of thoughts. Like Hartley, younger Coleridge needed to hint the paths from root nerves and stimuli to an ever-increasing and stylish spirituality. This grew to become entwined for him with a longer-lasting respect for the philosophy of Spinoza, who noticed thoughts and matter as the one attributes we are able to understand of the infinite being he known as deus sive natura (God or nature). Aged 22, Coleridge declared:
I’m a whole Necessitarian – and perceive the topic as effectively virtually as Hartley himself – however I’m going farther … and imagine the corporeality of thought – specifically, that it’s movement.
Associationists considered the thoughts as constructed up from quick sensations, whose traces then recall and modify one another in developing maps of expertise – a type of psychological atomism. Though he’d quickly quit materialistic psychology, he retained associationism as a concept of how animal and human thoughts start to get organised. Coleridge accepted what he noticed as its ‘half-truth’ in explaining a lot of psychological exercise on the ranges of sensation, want and the early awakenings of understanding. The basically deterministic concept, nevertheless, left little if any room for human freedom. How might this concept of an automated, irrational, desire-centred thoughts work so effectively at explaining the elementary features of thought and notion but totally contradict the experiences, certainly the very chance, of freedom, accountability, and the pursuit of upper functions? His reply would enable him to transcend the notion of the ‘corporeality of thought’ whereas staying with the speculation of it as ‘movement’, as he developed a view of thoughts as arising out of the interaction of opposed energies and functioning in a system of dynamics, or elementary forces.
It’s solely after we’re self-consciously conscious of concepts that we’re totally awake
Earlier than delving deeper into Coleridge’s ‘polar philosophy’, we want a clearer image of what he meant by ‘concepts’. For him, polar opposition derives from the power of concepts conceived subjectively, as ‘common concepts’, or objectively, as ‘cosmic legal guidelines’. His common concepts relate to ethical truths, historical past and the ‘humane sciences’, whereas the cosmic legal guidelines confer with the legal guidelines of nature and the bodily sciences. Coleridge’s notion of ‘concepts’ is akin to the Platonic concepts, equivalent to Goodness, Reality, Magnificence, Justice and so forth. From 1818 onwards, he gave various lists of such concepts, together with:
the Concepts of Being, Type, Life, the Motive, the Regulation of Conscience, Freedom, Immortality, God!
… concepts, (NB not pictures) because the theorems of some extent, a line, a circle, in Arithmetic; and of Justice, Holiness, Free-Will, &c in Morals.
and:
eternity … Will, Being, Intelligence, and communicative Life, Love, and Motion … with out change, with out succession.
The power to intuit and behold transcendent concepts, he argued, is what proves that ‘we’re born with the god-like college of Motive’, including that ‘it’s the enterprise of life to develop and apply it’, since these concepts:
represent … humanity. For attempt to conceive a man with out the concepts of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute fact, of the nice, the true, the gorgeous, the infinite. An animal endowed with a reminiscence of appearances and of info may stay. However the man could have vanished, and you’ve got as an alternative a creature, ‘extra subtile than any beast of the sphere, however likewise cursed above each beast of the sphere …’
Coleridge grew to become fascinated with the notion of common fact as a realm of ‘everlasting verities’ that originate and endure in some type of cosmic motive. This ‘motive’ he noticed as underlying the material of the Universe and comparable to each the common Logos of Heraclitus and the divine Logos of St John. Whereas Heraclitus is understood for his view of a world in such fixed flux that we are able to’t step into the identical river twice, he’s additionally the thinker who conceived of a common Logos, the all-encompassing order that permits a coherent and rational actuality to exist from what would in any other case be a swirling chaos. The Logos of St John is the Phrase that was with God to start with, which was and is God. It’s the religious coronary heart of actuality that entered into its personal creation by changing into flesh, changing into the sunshine of the world, if solely the darkness might understand it.
To Coleridge, these notions of Logos grew to become united because the dwelling thoughts through which the concepts as truths and powers reside. In some methods much like the grand programs of Schelling and Hegel, these concepts step by step change into realised by way of human ideas and actions by way of inspiration, creativeness and contemplation. Coleridge outlined the creativeness in its basic sense as ‘the dwelling Energy and prime Agent of all human Notion, and as a repetition within the finite thoughts of the everlasting act of creation within the infinite I Am.’ On this view, human inventive creativity, scientific discovery and philosophical perception share in an attenuated type of the unique, divine energy of creation by advantage of having the ability to attend in creativeness to concepts, or symbols of concepts, of final actuality. All the things that exists owes its being to the concepts. Nature, although charged with concepts, is sleeping; animal life, sleepwalking; with most of human life in a barely larger state of dreaming. It’s solely after we’re self-consciously conscious of concepts that we’re totally awake. As Coleridge described the sway of concepts in 1827, ‘all stay of their energy – the Concept working in them’, however solely ‘the Fewest among the many Few … stay of their Mild’.
All phenomena in nature and human historical past are symbolic appearances that reunite a conflict of elementary forces
Conceiving of those final and everlasting powers as ‘concepts’ subjectively (as basic to thoughts) and as ‘legal guidelines’ objectively (as basic to world), Coleridge positioned on the coronary heart of his philosophy a concept of powers past the human thoughts however accessible to it in contemplation, creativeness and in obscure intuitions. These ‘dwelling and life-producing Concepts’ had been ‘basically one with the germinal causes in Nature’. In an intriguing consequence of his concept of concepts, he didn’t dismiss bodily matter as mere look or summary idea with no corresponding actuality past subjective expertise. Slightly, as Coleridge noticed it, matter is a synthesis that arises out of the opposition of the basic forces of existence. It’s the elementary forces which are primal, and the matter that arises out of them is the efflorescence through which we participate, solely dimly conscious that we’re ‘linked with master-currents under the floor’.
Broader and deeper than any idealism that may put off matter as an phantasm or an abstraction, Coleridge retained it inside his system, a lot as he’d accomplished with associationism within the concept of thoughts. Thus, as he wrote in 1817, he noticed it important to:
contemplate matter as a Product – coagulum spiritûs [the coagulation of spirit], the pause, by interpenetration, of reverse energies – … whereas I maintain irrespective of as actual in any other case than because the copula [or synthesis] of those energies, consequently irrespective of with out Spirit, I educate then again an actual existence of a religious World with no materials.
From what Coleridge described as ‘the common Regulation of Polarity’ follows the actualisation of all subsequent existence within the type of metaphysical powers and forces of nature. Coleridge’s cosmology, like Schelling’s metaphysics, was a part of a post-Kantian motion of natural philosophy of nature that noticed itself versus atomism and associationism, and which was very a lot a metaphysics of powers that discovered deep consonance with Coleridge’s growing view of thoughts and the senses. From the precept of polar opposition springs not solely historical past, however all matter and all phenomena. In 1818, Coleridge outlined this regulation as follows:
Each Energy in Nature and in Spirit should evolve an reverse, as the only real means and situation of its manifestation: and all opposition is an inclination to re-union.
In a lineage from Kant, to Fichte, then Schelling, and shortly to be furthered by Hegel, the precept of polar opposition was made right into a tripartite logic, which Fichte was the primary to explain because the development by way of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, itself changing into a brand new thesis, thus persevering with the evolution. Coleridge developed this right into a ‘pentadic’ (or five-fold) logic, with the addition of the ‘prothesis’, because the originary concept that the thesis and antithesis manifest as reverse poles, and the ‘indifference level’, the midpoint between each thesis and antithesis. For Coleridge, synthesis is the decision of opposed forces into the fabric phenomena of expertise. All phenomena in nature and in human historical past are symbolic appearances that reunite a deeper conflict of elementary forces.
To Coleridge, the opposition of motive to sense was a basic polarity within the thoughts that demonstrates the polar dynamics of the cosmos. Following Kant, he construed motive as basically free, guided by fact and better values moderately than impulses and associations. This tug-of-war between motive and sense stretches the thoughts each ‘up’, into summary truths and the realm of freedom, compassion and humanity, and ‘down’, into sensuality, self-interest and the realm of nature. The decrease thoughts is important for the upper, which will depend on the previous for vitamin, bodily security and the fundamentals of society. Nonetheless, the dynamic is marked by a hierarchy: sense can evolve in direction of motive, however the truths of motive aren’t equally remodeled by sense and fundamental impulses. The center place, generated by the opposed dyad of sense ‘under’ and motive ‘above’, is the understanding, which is partly a mirrored image within the human thoughts of the common motive (or Logos) craving after science, artwork and social progress, and partly the rationally self-interested schemer that units itself to fulfill our pure needs. With this dynamic, Coleridge felt he’d ultimately marshalled these half-truths of associationism by displaying that they’ll maintain sway solely within the decrease thoughts.
With no foothold within the thoughts’s larger ranges, the primary ideas now swap from paths of enjoyment and the mechanics of contiguity to freedom, creativity and the pursuit of concepts. This switching over occurs on the crux, the essential level within the centre of Coleridge’s mannequin of thoughts, the place our lives are balanced between sensation stretching down into nature and motive stretching up into the concepts. All the things that occurs in human and pure historical past happens between these poles, with the acquainted components of our lives clumped across the unusual understanding on the center, the place we discover consolation in ideas supported by sensations ‘under’ and stirred on by concepts ‘above’.
Coleridge’s concept of concepts led to a philosophy the place the notion of matter itself was retained however reframed in a method that opposed the mechanical view that noticed the Universe as nothing greater than a community of mere matter. In probably the most thoroughgoing materialist accounts, even power and forces are presupposed to be reducible to matter. Towards this, Coleridge developed a philosophy of concepts as powers that noticed matter come up from opposed forces, forces come up from powers, powers and legal guidelines as the target facet of concepts, and concepts as residing eternally in cosmic motive, or Logos, the thoughts of God.
Coleridge’s philosophy of concepts countered the view of the Universe as ‘an immense heap of little issues’
His philosophy gained a comprehensiveness past psychology and philosophy of thoughts as his enquiries progressed into cosmology and the metaphysics of matter. All through his life, Coleridge looked for a unified view of actuality that was without delay bodily and religious. As he wrote in a letter in October 1797:
often all issues seem little – all of the information, that may be acquired, little one’s play – the universe itself – what however an immense heap of little issues? – I can ponder nothing however components, & components are all little – ! – My thoughts feels as if it ached to behold & know one thing nice – one thing one & indivisible – and it’s only within the religion of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty! – However on this religion all issues counterfeit infinity!
Over the course of the subsequent three-and-a-half a long time, Coleridge developed his philosophy of concepts that countered the view of the Universe as ‘an immense heap of little issues’ and changed it with a cosmos of concepts, powers and forces that give rise to the fabric world. On this method, he ended up offering his various to the mechanistic materialism, expounded to various levels by Galileo, Descartes, Locke and Newton, that he noticed as eradicating too many ‘optimistic properties’ from the world, which then, abstracted into mere ‘determine and mobility’, turns into ‘a dull Machine whirled about by the mud of its personal Grinding’.
Slightly than reject associationism within the thoughts and materialism within the cosmos, Coleridge disavowed as an alternative their abject extremes whereas managing to embrace what many would have too simply dismissed outright because the ‘enemy’ perspective. Mill counseled Coleridge’s ‘catholic and unsectarian … spirit’ as ‘much less excessive in its opposition’ than the materialist positions as a result of ‘it denies much less of what’s true within the doctrine it wars in opposition to’. The poet-philosopher was applauded for correcting what he noticed as harmful ‘half-truths’ by retaining them inside a broader, balanced ambit. Coleridge didn’t even totally reject utilitarianism, as a result of even right here he sought what was true in it, and realised that it warranted a restricted place inside the entire. His method, in his phrases, embraced inclusion, not exclusion:
Exclude Utility? No. My System of Ethical Philosophy neither excludes nor rests on it: had been it for that reason solely that it contains it.
Coleridge corrected what he noticed as harmful half-truths – on both facet of the problems he encountered – by retaining what was invaluable in them inside a broader, balanced overview:
My system … is the one try I do know ever made to scale back all knowledges into concord. It … reveals … how that which was true within the specific in every … grew to become error, as a result of it was solely half the reality.
He persuaded a lot of his empiricist and utilitarian British contemporaries of the hazards of understanding all the things mechanistically, together with thoughts and humanity itself. With these strategies, Coleridge achieved not solely an astonishingly broad and holistic philosophy of nice mental richness and scope, but additionally cast an excellent synthesis inside the tradition wars of his time, which we might effectively heed at present.
