![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Logic and its interpretation of Kant's “science of transcendental analysis” as a theory of the cognitive faculties and their “inherent forms” or “several functional powers”. I explain why Coleridge characterises transcendental analysis as an “investigation into the constitution and constituent forms” of the faculties, and consider the reasons behind his schematic division of such inquiry into “transcendental [ … ] Æsthetic, Logic, and Noetic”. I argue that Coleridge's claims about the forms, operations, and contents that derive from different cognitive powers, and the philosophical method that enables us to prove such derivation, are based on Kant's theory of “transcendental reflection”. I also explain how Coleridge's facultative conception of transcendental analysis relates to recent scholarship on Kant's accounts of (i) our cognitive capacities and (ii) the purposes of transcendental reflection. My essay does not aim to defend Coleridge's interpretation of Kant, but rather to provide a clearer picture of how this interpretation informs Coleridge's analysis of cognitive activity and mental content in Logic, including his “transcendental noetic”, which seeks to explain the possibility of the kind intellectual intuition that Kant explicitly denies.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for comments that helped to significantly improve this paper.
Notes
1 Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 5, 81.
2 Coleridge, Logic, 213 (see also, 145–9, 211–14, 241–54). Coleridge sometimes distinguishes “faculties” from “powers”, and sometimes uses these terms interchangeably. Because, in either context (in Logic), both terms refer to the capacity to exercise some cognitive ability (e.g. perceiving, conceiving, judging), I do not distinguish sharply between them here. For further discussion of Coleridge's faculty terminology, see Struwig, “Powers and Plantules”. On the historical background of the Logic manuscript (composed c. 1819–1822), see Jackson, “Editor's Introduction”, xxxix–lv; Milnes, “Coleridge's Logic”.
3 Coleridge, Logic, 205.
4 See Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 5, 81; Coleridge, Logic, 205.
5 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B317–18, for this definition (Hereafter CPR). I follow the standard A/B pagination for CPR (all translations from Guyer and Wood).
6 See Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 289, on Kant's rejection of intellectual intuition. See also Hedley, “Coleridge's Intellectual Intuition”.
7 The most detailed studies are Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism, 246–62, and Wellek, Kant in England, 117–24, which both praise Coleridge's expository work in Logic but do not comment further on its philosophical significance. See also Jackson, “Editor's Introduction”, lvi–lxvii, which documents the manuscript's aims and sources, focusing on Coleridge's debts to Kant. For recent philosophical discussion of Coleridge and Kant, see Bode, “Coleridge and Philosophy”; Class, Coleridge and Kantian Ideas; Milnes, The Truth About Romanticism, ch. 5; Struwig, “Coleridge's Two-Level Theory”; Vigus, “The Philosophy of Coleridge”. Evans, “Coleridge as Thinker”, 323, notes the “sparse extant scholarship” on Logic.
8 Coleridge, Logic, 165, 169 (see also 145–9, 212–14). The scepticism regarding “the imaginary subject of transcendental psychology” expressed in Strawson, Bounds of Sense, 32, remains influential, but several scholars have recently defended the value of interpretations that focus on further contextualising and elucidating Kant's claims about the cognitive powers. See e.g. Hatfield, Natural and Normative; Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology; Longuenesse, Capacity to Judge; Waxman, Kant's Anatomy.
9 Coleridge, Logic, 268 (see also 205–10). Compare Kant, CPR, B327–8.
10 Coleridge, Logic, 69, 141n. See also Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 32; Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 3, 11–14; Coleridge, Opus Maximum, 206–8, 221–4, 275.
11 See Logic, lvi–viii, on Coleridge's sources, which includes material from Kant, Mendelssohn, and Schelling, along with various non-philosophical texts.
12 For further details concerning these borrowings, see the editor's notes to Logic, 150–73 (the Aesthetic); 239–71 (the Analytic); 178–224 (Prolegomena); 53–103 (Jäsche Logic and The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures). This list is not exhaustive. Contrary to his use of Kantian concepts and materials in other texts (e.g. The Friend and Lay Sermons, where no direct acknowledgement of their provenance is given), Coleridge's Logic manuscript is more scrupulous about recording his philosophical debts to Kant, especially when discussing the arguments of the transcendental aesthetic and logic (see e.g. Logic, 76, 148–9, 268). It should be noted, however, that he seldom indicates when he is translating from Kant's texts.
13 See e.g. Logic, 154, 169, where Coleridge breaks off from the direct translation of Kant's aesthetic to introduce his own views (which dispute Kant's position on the limits of possible cognition). Compare 162–5, 251–4, 262–6, where Coleridge interrupts the translation of Kant's text with his own expositions of the Kantian forms of sensibility and understanding. This defining characteristic of Coleridge's Logic has received little scholarly attention.
14 Kant, CPR, B316–49 (the “Appendix” to Kant's Transcendental Analytic).
15 Kant, CPR, B25.
16 Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology, 15.
17 Kant, CPR, B29–30, B75–6.
18 Kant, CPR, B75–6, B170–1, B352–5.
19 See e.g. Coleridge, Logic, 235–8, 246–7.
20 Coleridge, Logic, 146–7.
21 Coleridge, Logic, 13, 213.
22 See Kant, CPR, B90. Compare Coleridge, Logic, 212–14.
23 Coleridge, Logic, 213.
24 Coleridge, Logic, 212–13.
25 Coleridge, Logic, 213, 237–8.
26 Coleridge, Logic, 153; compare Kant, CPR, B25.
27 See Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology, ch. 1–2; Waxman, Kant's Anatomy, ch. 1.
28 See Coleridge, Logic, 43–4, 145–6 on finite minds, 85, 141n on “the Supreme Mind”. See Struwig, “Coleridge's Two-Level Theory”, 196–202, for further discussion.
29 See Waxman, Kant's Anatomy, esp. ch. 1, for a recent defence of such a facultative (i.e. psychological) reading of the Kantian a priori. For an overview of the long-running dispute between “logical” and “psychological” interpretations of Kant's transcendental philosophy, see Beiser, German Idealism, 163–76. On “pure analysis”, see Coleridge, Logic, 212–14. See also Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 4, 5094 (c. 1823), on “the Pure (i.e. exclusively mental)”. See Logic, 76, for Coleridge's definition of the a priori.
30 Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 4, 117–18. Coleridge uses “idea” here in the Lockean sense of a mental representation or “whatever is the immediate object of the mind” (Coleridge, Logic, 233n), rather than in his preferred Platonic sense (see 212). He is responding to arguments in John Petvin's Letters Concerning Mind (1750). See Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 3, 957, 965–8, for similar responses to C.F. Nicolai's Ueber meine gelehrte Bildung (1799).
31 Kant, CPR, B90. Coleridge claims that Kant is the first philosopher to successfully attempt this “dissection of the faculty of understanding”, describing him as “the first scientific analyst of the logical faculty [i.e. the understanding]” (Coleridge, Logic, 268). Kemp Smith's earlier translation renders Zergliederung as “dissection” rather than “analysis”.
32 Kant, CPR, B38. Kant most often uses this term with reference to sensibility (see e.g. B38, B44, B59), and less frequently to the human mind and its capacities in general (B38, B404–5) or the understanding itself (A250), sometimes omitting the modifier “subjektiven”.
33 See e.g. Coleridge, Logic, 45, 145–9, 155, 162, 203n, 213, 239.
34 Kant, CPR, B38, B40.
35 Coleridge, Logic, 155 (based on Kant, CPR, B37–8).
36 Coleridge, Logic, 169; Kant, CPR, B40–1 (but cf. Logic, 170, where Coleridge uses Kant's term “transcendental exposition” in the sense defined at CPR, B40).
37 Coleridge, Logic, 45 (steam engine). For similar analogies, see 139–43 (optical instruments and automata); 163–5 (kaleidoscope); 254 (geometrical lathe).
38 On contemporary functionalist interpretations of Kant, see Schlicht and Newen, “Kant and Cognitive Science”, 88, 97–106. Like Kant, Coleridge rejects naturalistic theories of cognitive functions (Coleridge, Logic, 37, 266n).
39 See notes 8 and 29 above for further details.
40 See Coleridge, Logic, 76, 212–14.
41 Beiser, German Idealism, 172.
42 Coleridge, Logic, 151.
43 Kant, Prolegomena, §21 (54); Coleridge, Logic, 43n, 146, 203, 212.
44 Coleridge often uses the term “evidence” to designate a specific kind of cognitive content (i.e. what is given or apprehended in some pure or empirical representation). See Coleridge, Logic, 43–4. For a similar rendering of Kant's representation terminology (i.e. “Vorstellung”), see Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology, 66. Compare Coleridge, Logic, 151, 238.
45 Kant, CPR, B316 (see also B33–5, 74–82); compare Coleridge, Logic, 151–4, 266n, and esp. 234: “it is only by means of this reflection, by which we represent the mind as a whole consisting of all its thoughts as its parts, that we can form any conception of the mind at all”.
46 Kant, CPR, B317.
47 Kant, CPR, B317–18; compare Coleridge, 153–4, 169, 246–7, 265–6n. On Kant's definition, see Bird, The Revolutionary Kant, 540–3; de Boer, “Pure Reason's Enlightenment”.
48 See Kant, CPR, B25, 34–5, 81–2. Compare Coleridge, Logic, 146–9. On Kant's conception of a priori possibility and its relation to the faculties, see e.g. Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology, 14–21; Waxman, Kant's Anatomy, 27–32.
49 Kant, CPR, B25 (see also B2, B74–5).
50 Coleridge, Logic, 153; compare 169.
51 Coleridge, Logic, 145, 153, 212–13.
52 Bird, The Revolutionary Kant, 542. Bird continues: “The procedure is no different from abstracting acoustic, phonological, syntactic, and semantic aspects from a spoken utterance in which those elements are literally inseparable”.
53 Kant, CPR, B318–19. Coleridge agrees with Kant on this point, but it should be noted that some early modern theories of logic (particularly those popular in Coleridge's own time, such as Isaac Watts’ Logick [1725]) typically do not make a clear distinction between the activities of analysing our cognitive faculties and practising (or theorising about) formal logic.
54 See Kant, CPR, B316–24.
55 Kant, CPR, B319.
56 Kant, CPR, B327–8.
57 See e.g. Westphal, Kant's Proof, 2: “Kant's account of transcendental reflection, like his name for it, are conspicuously rare, almost absent, from Kant scholarship”.
58 Recent studies include de Boer, “Pure Reason's Enlightenment”; Hessbrüggen-Walter, “Topik, Reflexion und Vorurteilskritik”; Merritt, “Spontaneity in Kant”; Merritt, “Varieties of Reflection”.
59 Westphal, Kant's Proof, 2.
60 Westphal, Kant's Proof, 3.
61 Westphal, Kant's Proof, 10, 14.
62 Merritt, “Spontaneity in Kant”, 1002–3.
63 Merritt, “Spontaneity in Kant”, 997, 1000.
64 Kant, CPR, B326.
65 Merritt “Spontaneity in Kant”, 997–8.
66 See Coleridge, Logic, 88–92, 139–40n.
67 Merritt “Spontaneity in Kant”, 998.
68 Coleridge, Logic, 139–40n. See 130 for Coleridge's distinction between “substantial reality and apparent reality” and its relation to “the idea of the Supreme Reality” (i.e. God).
69 Coleridge, Logic, 69–70, 85, 141n, 169.
70 Merritt's phrase, “Varieties of Reflection”, 496.
71 See Coleridge, Logic, 168–9, 205–6, 235–8.
72 Merritt “Spontaneity in Kant”, 997–8.
73 Westphal, Kant's Proof, 10, 14.
74 Coleridge, Logic, 213, 204.
75 See Coleridge, Logic, 44.
76 See e.g. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 289n; Coleridge, Logic, 139–40n, 206. For further discussion, see Berkley, Crisis of Reason, 188–99; Struwig, “Powers and Plantules”.
77 Coleridge, Logic, 44–5 (see 33–6 on the relations between the faculties listed in this table). Readers may wonder at the absence of imagination here: this is because imagination does not itself produce intuitions or concepts, but rather plays a key role in their synthesis (not only in sense-perception but also in mathematical cognition), as well as in the apprehension of ideas. See e.g. Coleridge, Logic, 73–6, 215–24, 266n. On the function of imagination in Coleridge's account of cognition, see Cheyne, “The Mental Powers”.
78 Coleridge, Logic, 44n, 248; see also 111–12, 263–6. See e.g. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 75–156, for this standard account of Kant's theory of cognition.
79 Coleridge, Logic, 36, 41, 44, 111–12.
80 Coleridge, Logic, 36, 40, 212, 225. See Milnes, The Truth About Romanticism, 166–75, on how Coleridge's table “ranks the metaphysical disciplines”.
81 See Kant, CPR, B74–82, B317 (the source for Coleridge, Logic, 145–7, 152–4, 211–14). On this method, see Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology, 14–21.
82 Coleridge, Logic, 154 (based on Kant, CPR, B34–5). Coleridge notes that this procedure involves “abstract[ing] from [ … ] the sensations, for instance, of pleasure, pain, heat, vividness, colour, and all the degrees and opposites of these” (154; compare 212–14; Bird, Revolutionary Kant, 540–3).
83 Coleridge, Logic, 70. Coleridge uses μάθησης interchangeably with θϵωρία, to refer to the faculty of sense or “intuitive power of the mind” (see e.g. 34–6, 73–5, 245). The text in square brackets is the definition of noetic at Coleridge, Logic, 44.
84 See Coleridge, Logic, 211–14, 266n.
85 Coleridge, Logic, 35–6, 70.
86 See Coleridge, Logic, 215–24 (mathematical evidence); 79, 266 (logical evidence); 43–4, 169, 211–12 (noetic evidence, i.e. “truths of reason” considered as “ideas and first principles” in ontology, theology, and ethics).
87 Kant, CPR, B317. As de Boer, “Pure Reason's Enlightenment”, notes, for Kant, the purpose of transcendental reflection is to establish that human minds lack a capacity to cognise things-in-themselves (e.g. Leibnizian reflection or Schellingian intellectual intuition).
88 See Coleridge, Logic, 70n, 151. Compare Bird, The Revolutionary Kant, 542: “Kant's exercise can be understood as a way of abstracting diverse elements in our experience which cannot be literally separated, and theoretically assigning them to one or other faculty”.
89 See Coleridge, Logic, 211–38. See also Struwig, “Coleridge's Two-Level Theory”, 203–9.
90 See Coleridge, Logic, 211–14 (compare 66–70, 236–8).
91 See Coleridge, Logic, 211–14 (esp. 212n), 247–8, 265–6n.
92 See Coleridge, Logic 32–41, 127–31, 148–9n, 205–10. Compare Kant, CPR, B880–3.
93 Coleridge, Logic, 210; see also, 146–9, 205–6n, 211–14, 247–8, 268.
94 Coleridge, Logic, 148–9n, 205–6. Coleridge mentions Francis Bacon and George Herbert as anticipators of Kant (Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 3, 919; vol. 5, 81–2).
95 See Coleridge, Logic, 145, 203n on cognitive constitution.
96 Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 5, 81–2, written on the flyleaves of Coleridge's copy of John Smith's Select Discourses (1660). For a similar assessment of Cambridge Platonism, see Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 3, 918–21, written on the flyleaves of his copy of Henry More's Theological Works (1708). Both sets of marginalia were written c. 1823–1824. Coleridge knew Spinoza's philosophy well, but does not specify here if Spinoza is guilty of similar errors. His criticisms of More's Cartesian position presumably also apply to Descartes.
97 See Coleridge, Logic, 248.
98 See Coleridge, Logic, 68–70, 145–7, 152–4, 211–14, 238–45.
99 See Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 5, 81–2; Coleridge, Logic, 34–6, 69–70, 211–14, 237–8. See also Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 32, 70.
100 See Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 3, 11–14, 918–21; vol. 5, 81–2. See also Coleridge, Logic, 34–41, 43–5, 139–49.
101 Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 5, 81–2.
102 Coleridge, Logic, 169 (compare 43–4, 225).
103 Coleridge, Logic, 153, 212–14.
104 See Coleridge, Logic, 34–6, 68–70, 169; Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, 155–8.
105 See Coleridge, Logic, 141n, 165, 169 (drawing on Kant, CPR, B46–9).
106 Coleridge, Logic, 44; Kant, CPR, B317–18.
107 Coleridge, Logic, 169 (this applies to both sense and understanding).
108 See Coleridge, Logic, 151–4, 234, 266n.
109 See Coleridge, Logic, 151–4, 169, 212–14.
110 See Coleridge, Logic, 34–6, 43–4, 236–8. See also Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 32; Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 3, 11–14.
111 Coleridge, Logic, 169.
112 On Kant's use of this approach in his “transcendental exposition” of space and time as the forms of sensible intuition, see Falkenstein, Kant's Intuitionism, 72–4. See Coleridge, Logic, 90, on “the striking analogies between reason and sense”, which may hint at parallels between transcendental noetic and aesthetic (compare 169; Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 3, 11–14).
113 On this “third and concluding portion”, see Coleridge, Logic, 76, 169. Evans, “Coleridge as Thinker”, 339, notes that “L[ogic]'s missing third part on the Noetic is the domain of much of OM [Opus Maximum]”.
114 As implicitly acknowledged at Coleridge, Logic, 266n, where, following Kant, ontological claims about the mind are ruled out of transcendental analysis. See also note 87 above.
115 See Coleridge, Logic, 41, on “negative idealism” and “negative materialism”, as theoretical perspectives on mind (in transcendental analysis) and nature (in physical science) that eschew ontological commitments for methodological reasons.
116 Coleridge, Logic, 225 (see also 43–4, 212, 236–8).
117 Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 5, 81–2; Coleridge, Logic, 36, 44, 154.
118 Coleridge, Logic, 169. On Kant's restrictive use of transcendental reflection, see Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 325–8; de Boer, “Pure Reason's Enlightenment”, 67–71. See Struwig, “Powers and Plantules”, 72–9, for a critical assessment of Coleridge's position.
119 See Coleridge, Logic, 139–40n, which treats Kant's limitation of cognition to appearances as accurate, but applicable only to the unaided discursive intellect. “Negative” transcendental noetic views divine reason as a theoretical presupposition, later established in noetics proper.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dillon Struwig
Dillon Struwig teaches at Sophia University in Tokyo. His research focuses on Coleridge's philosophy of cognition, theory of metaphysical methodology, and philosophy of nature, especially as articulated in Coleridge's Logic and Opus Maximum manuscripts, philosophical marginalia, and later notebooks. Much of this work seeks to facilitate a deeper examination of Coleridge's response to and interpretation of Kant's critical philosophy. He is also a contributor to the international research project Living Ideas: Dynamic Philosophies of Life and Matter, 1650-1850.