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ABSTRACT
Situating Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s thought on historically actualized ideas with reference to a range of classical thinkers, this article examines his intriguing philosophical theory about how ideas become progressively actualized in history. This cultural growth can be understood as contemplation-in-action, although it occurs through mainly fumbling – or else overenthusiastic – human agents. I distinguish Coleridgean first-order, transcendent ideas (such as God, infinity, the good, the soul) from second-order, historical ones (such as church, state, the constitution). It has been argued that Coleridge’s theory of ideas develops from Bacon’s inductive method for discovering laws of nature through experiment and natural law through common law. I further claim that Coleridge upholds the reality of “Forms” in science, and of rights in ethics and politics; that his later political thought is inherently more progressive than is generally admitted; and that his account differs from Schelling’s and Hegel’s respective theories by maintaining the transcendence of ideas above the immanence of their evolving historical actualizations. Coleridge’s philosophy is therefore, whether political or metaphysical, ultimately an ontological defence of the transcendence of ideas above the immanence of their progressive but imperfect actualization.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Dillon Struwig for discussing Coleridge’s relation to Schelling, to Joe O’Leary for discussion on Hegel and historicity and to the two anonymous reviewers.
Notes on contributor
Peter Cheyne is an Associate Professor at Shimane University, and Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at Durham University. He is leading two international projects, one on the Aesthetics of Perfection and Imperfection, and the other on Dynamic Philosophies of Life and Matter, 1650–1850. Editor and co-author of Coleridge and Contemplation (OUP, 2017), he recently completed a monograph titled Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy.
Notes
1 Coleridge, Church and State, 15–16.
2 Ibid., 47 fn. In works by Coleridge, “fn” denotes Coleridge’s original footnotes and “n” those by his editors.
3 Wheeler, “Semiosis of Bacon’s Scientific Empiricism”, 49.
4 Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 500. See also Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 256.
5 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 303.
6 Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, 105. Coleridge’s poem was first published in Blackwood’s Magazine, January 1822.
7 Coleridge, Opus Maximum, 243.
8 Ibid., 245.
9 Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, 30.
10 Schelling, “Further Presentations”, 377; Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 362.
11 For Schelling’s and Coleridge’s return to the Platonic tradition in order to move beyond Kant’s doctrine against human intellectual intuition, see Vigus, Platonic Coleridge, 45.
12 Coleridge, Church and State, 47 fn.
13 Ibid.
14 Vigus, “Philosophy of Coleridge”, 528.
15 Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, 29.
16 Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 4, §5294 f20 (1825–1826).
17 In an editorial introduction to the attributed letters, John M. Cooper holds that the Seventh Letter is “the least unlikely to have come from Plato” and if genuine is of “significance for working out his final positions”, especially “his commitment to the Forms, and […] the defectiveness of language to express […] any philosophical treatise”; see Plato, in Complete Works, 1635.
18 Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 4, §5294 f20 (1825–1826).
19 Coleridge, Church and State, 167.
20 Kooy, “Coleridge’s Idea of History”, 718.
21 Coleridge, Church and State, 15.
22 Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 5, 798.
23 Coleridge, Logic, 212.
24 Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 5, §5495 f63 (April 1827). See also, Coleridge, Church and State, 13.
25 Coleridge, Church and State, 12.
26 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 249.
27 Strawson, The Bounds of Sense.
28 Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 5, 789, notes on W. G. Tennemann’s Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 13 (Leipzig, 1811).
29 Coleridge, “Ideal of an Ink-Stand”, in Shorter Works and Fragments, vol. 2, 947.
30 Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 497 n, printing a note that Coleridge wrote in Copy D, 23 June 1829.
31 Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 4, §5288 (December 1825).
32 The locus classicus of the statement is at Plato, Apology, Complete Works, 38a5–6, where Socrates says that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. See also Plato, in Complete Works, Apology, 30b; Plato, in Complete Works, Gorgias, 500a–b, 507c.
33 Plato, Meno, in Complete Works, 82b–85c; Plato, in Complete Works, Phaedo, 72e–78b. See also Plato, in Complete Works, Phaedrus, 249b–c for the account of our un-forgetting (anámnēsis) of the ideas as recalling knowledge of all true being not as individuals but as within divine unity.
34 Coleridge, Church and State, 13, 16.
35 Ibid., 17–18.
36 Eliot, “Dry Salvages”, ll. 179–80, Four Quartets, 31.
37 Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 156, quoting Hamlet, 1.2.150.
38 Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 5, §6562 (December 1830).
39 Coleridge, Church and State, 13.
40 Ibid., 16.
41 Ibid., 30–31.
42 Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 177 n.
43 Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy gives a thorough intellectual history of the notion of lógos as it concerns Coleridge.
44 Heraclitus, The Fragments, 11 (Fragment 1).
45 Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, 97.
46 Heraclitus, The Fragments, 11 (Fragment 2). See also Ibid., 178 (Ancient Testimonia 16 1 b): “Man is not rational; only the surrounding substance is intelligent”.
47 Ibid., 57 (Fragment 94).
48 Coleridge, Church and State, 171. See also Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, 97, quoting a related fragment of Heraclitus.
49 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 251–52, quoting Plotinus, Enneads, vol. 3, 3.8.4. Quoted also in Coleridge, Logic, 74.
50 Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 488; Coleridge, Church and State, 13.
51 Coleridge, 14 January 1820, in Letters, vol. 5, 15.
52 Wheeler, “Semiosis of Bacon’s Scientific Empiricism”, 47.
53 Bacon, New Organon, Bk 1, §55, 83.
54 Ibid., Bk 2, Aphorism 2, 103. The “common use” of the term “Form” he refers to is derived from the Platonic theory of forms and the Aristotelian formal cause.
55 Coleridge, Logic, 44–45.
56 Bacon, New Organon, Bk 2, Aphorism 9, 109.
57 Raiger, “Coleridge’s Theory of Symbol”, 314.
58 Wheeler, “Semiosis of Bacon’s Scientific Empiricism”, 54.
59 Ibid., 45.
60 Ibid., 55.
61 Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 492.
62 Latin: “[No man can find out] the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end”; see Ecclesiastes 3:11.
63 Bacon, “Advancement of Learning”, Bk 2, 197.
64 Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, 30.
65 Coleridge, Church and State, 10. See also Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, 11.
66 Coleridge, Church and State, 19.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., 20.
69 Ibid., 21. See also Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 2, §2598 f80v (1805).
70 Coleridge, Church and State, 22.
71 Ibid., 18.
72 Ibid., 12.
73 Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, 7.
74 This analogy is from Sartre’s argument that “it is just as impossible to attain the essence by heaping up the accidents as it is to arrive at unity by the indefinite addition of figures to the right of 0.99”; see Sartre, Theory of the Emotions, 4.
75 See Whistler, Schelling’s Theory, esp. 70–94 for a helpful account of Schelling’s early-to-middle-period metaphysics and Ideenlehre (theory of ideas).
76 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 211; Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 3, 603.
77 Coleridge, November 1818, in Letters, vol. 4, 883.
78 O’Regan, “The Trinity”, 263.
79 See Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 3, §3587 (July–September 1809): “Where both the position and the fact are imagined, it is Hypopoiēsis not Hypothesis, subfiction not supposition”.
80 Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 4, 432–33.
81 Coleridge, Logic, 45 fn.
82 The early, Fichtean Schelling discusses absolute knowing but sees it as an infinite task or an unrealizable though constantly pursued goal for human intellectual activity. However, with his Naturphilosophie, and certainly after 1801, as Beiser summarizes, “Schelling now naturalizes the absolute, or he absolutizes nature, so that the absolute is identical with the universe itself”; see Beiser, German Idealism, 551.
83 Schelling, Essence of Human Freedom, 35; Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 7, 360.
84 Schelling, Philosophical Religion, 31; Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 47.
85 Coleridge, Church and State, 83.
86 Ibid., 43.
87 Mill, Utilitarianism (1861), in Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, 212.
88 Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 3, 423, notes on Lacuna y Diaz’s The Coming of the Messiah (trans. Edward Irving, 1827).
89 Coleridge to his brother-in-law, George Fricker, 4 October 1806, in Letters, vol. 2, 1190.
90 Coleridge, Church and State, 35–36.
91 Ibid., 42–43.
92 Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 500.
93 Moran, “Coleridge”, 137.
94 Mill, “Coleridge” (1840), in Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, 123.
95 Coleridge, Lectures: On Literature, vol. 1, 585.
96 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 68.
97 Coleridge, Church and State, 50.
98 Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 2, 990, 994. Coleridge’s annotations to Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (1812–1816), made c. 1818, amount to around 1250 words and are reproduced in Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 2, 988–97.
99 Coleridge, Church and State, 20.
100 Hegel, Science of Logic, 50.
101 Coleridge, Church and State, 21.
102 De Paolo, “Coleridge, Hegel, and the Philosophy of History”, 33.
103 Coleridge, Church and State, 30.
104 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §258, 279.
105 Rasmussen, “The Transformation of Metaphysics”, 20. Rasmussen quotes Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 431.
106 Bacon inductively derives the principles of English law from common law, in a process analogous to discovering laws of nature; see Bacon, Elements of the Common Lawes.
107 Plato, Republic, in Complete Works, 338c.
108 Hobbes, Leviathan, Pt 2, Ch. 17, vol. 2, 254. Coleridge renders Hobbes’s Thrasymachian dictum as: “Laws without swords are but bits of parchment”; see Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 172–73.
109 Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 173. Coleridge alters and abbreviates James Harrington’s riposte to Hobbes, transforming it to make an anti-materialist point; see Harrington, Political Works, Pt 1, 165.
110 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 37.
111 Coleridge, Church and State, 16 n.
112 Ibid., 10.
113 Kooy, “Romanticism and Coleridge’s Idea of History”, 718.
114 Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual 28.
115 Coleridge, “On Observing a Blossom” (1796), in Poetical Works Part One, vol. 1, 257, ll. 17–18.
116 Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, 24.
117 Gregory, Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination, 96.
118 Coleridge, Church and State, 59.
119 Ibid.
120 Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 494. This clause is repeated a dozen years later in Coleridge, Church and State, 49. Another instance of the distinction is given in Coleridge, Lectures: On the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, 81.
121 Coleridge, Church and State, 69.
122 Shaffer, “Religion and Literature”, 148. For Kant on the visible and the invisible church, and “the true universal church”, see Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, passim.
123 Coleridge, Poetical Works, vol. 1, 61.
124 Coleridge, Church and State, 69.
125 Ibid., 47 fn.
126 Ibid., 48–49. See also Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 500.
127 Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 106.
128 Coleridge, Church and State, 47 fn.
129 Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 106.
130 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 152.
131 Niebuhr, Streams of Grace, 58.
132 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 303.
133 For a variety of perspectives on the importance of nóēsis, or contemplation, to Coleridge as an access to ideas independent of the human mind, see ed. Peter Cheyne, Coleridge and Contemplation.