COLERIDGE AS PHILOSOPHER by JOHN H. MUIRHEAD M. A., GLASGOW AND OXFORD LL. D., GLASGOW AND CALIFORNIA EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF..

Coleridge has been seen by some not so much as a poet spoiled by philosophy, but as a philosopher who was also a poet. It could be argued that his major endeavor was an attempt to save the life sciences form the mechanistic interpretation which he saw as the outcome of Lockean "mechanico-corpuscularian" philosophy. This contribution describes that endeavour. It shows its connection to the social circumstances of the time. It discussess its relationship to the poetic sensibility of the (...) "Lake poets" and to the German thought which Coleridge absorbed during and after his sojourn in Gottingen in 1798-99. It describes the nature of his "Theory of Life" as seen not only from the posthumous publication itself, but also from the numerous hints and struggles recorded in his voluminous notebooks, letters and lecture notes. It is concluded that, although never adequately assembled, it forms the only serious attempt to construct a profound alternative to the ultimately mechanistic biology of Charles Darwin and the physiologists of the second half of the century. As such it strongly influenced the young Richard Owen and, as is well known, was eventually overwhelmed by the Darwin-Huxley synthesis of the 1860s. Nevertheless, insofar as Coleridge's concept of life ultimately derived from his ambition to find a way of healing the Cartesian divide, we may wonder whether the recent upsurge in consciousness studies may cause us to look again at his panentheistic ideas and, discarding the obsolete and fanciful metaphysics, recast them into a more acceptable form. (shrink)

This work explores an aspect of Yeats's writing largely ignored until now: namely, his wide-ranging absorption in S.T. Coleridge. Gibson explores the consistent and densely woven allusions to Coleridge in Yeats's prose and poetry, often in conjunction with other Romantic figures, arguing that the earlier poet provided him with both a model of philosopher - 'the sage' - and an interpretation of metaphysical ideas which were to have a resounding effect on his later poetry, and upon his rewriting (...) of A Vision. (shrink)

A través del análisis de un fragmento escrito probablemente en torno a 1818, intento mostrar en este artículo cómo el descubrimiento del origen de la prosa significó un hito relevante en el pensamiento de Samuel Taylor Coleridge acerca de la distinción entre verso y prosa. Esta marca se fundó en sus estudios de los presocráticos y coincidió con su teoría estética enraizada en el pensamiento de Plotino. Intento poner en evidencia, entonces, cómo una discusión estilística adquirió un alcance filosófico (...) e incluso teológico. (shrink)

Originally published in 1980, this is a study of the 'romanticism' of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Their concern with creativity, and the conditions that helped or hindered their own artistic development, produced a new concept of mental growth - a 'modern' view of the mind as organic, active, and unifying. In particular, we see how their aesthetics evolved from a personal and intuitional need to reaffirm 'value' in their own lives. Their discovery of the fundamental ambiguity of such intuition is (...) discussed in relation to some ideas of Empson, Gombrich, and Ehrenzweig. As well as an essay in criticism, this is a contribution to the history of ideas, drawing together points in the background of philosophical and psychological theory from Hartley and Wesley to John Stuart Mill. Since many of our ideas about imagination, symbolism, and creativity are ultimately derived from Coleridge and Wordsworth, this is a book for students of romantic and modern literature. (shrink)

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes's seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain's greatest poets.

This book traces the development of Coleridge's philosophy of language, situating it in the intellectual climate of his era. James C. McKusick offers the persuasive and original argument that Coleridge's linguistic theories for a coherent body of thought underlying his poetry, criticism, and aesthetics.

As a young man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived in an age of great social change. The political upheavals in America and France, the industrial revolution, and the explosion in humanity's knowledge of the natural order all had a profound effect on Coleridge and radical intellectuals like him. This book examines Coleridge's ideas on science and society in the critical years 1794 to 1796, setting them within the moral, political, and scientific context of the time. Wylie shows how (...) the complex poem, Religious Musings, became a vehicle for these ideas and how they were then developed in the poetry of Coleridge's later years. (shrink)

James Vigus's study traces Coleridge's discovery of a Plato marginalised in the universities, and examines his use of German sources on the 'divine philosopher' ...

Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason examines Coleridge's understanding of the Pantheism Controversy - the crisis of reason in German philosophy - and reveals the context informing Coleridge's understanding of German thinkers. It challenges previous accounts of Coleridge's philosophical engagements, forcing a reconsideration of his reading of figures such as Schelling, Jacobi and Spinoza. This exciting new study establishes the central importance of the contested status of reason for Coleridge's poetry, accounts of the imagination and (...) later religious thought. (shrink)

Coleridge tended to view objects in the natural world as if they were capable of articulating truths about his own poetic psyche. He also regarded such objects as if they were capable of illustrating and concretely embodying truths about a transcendent spiritual realm. After 1805, he posited a series of analogical 'likenesses' connecting the rational principles that inform human cognition with the rational principles that he believed informed the teleological structure of the natural world. Human reason and the principle (...) of rationality realised objectively in Nature were both regarded as finite effects of God's seminal Word. Although Coleridge intuitively felt that nature had been constructed as a 'mirror' of the human mind, and that both mind and nature were 'mirrors' of a transcendent spiritual realm, he never found an explanation of such experiences that was fully immune to his own sceptical doubts. Coleridge and Scepticism examines the nature of these sceptical doubts, as well as offering a new explanatory account of why Coleridge was unable to affirm his religious intuitions. Ben Brice situates his work within two important intellectual traditions. The first, a tradition of epistemological 'piety' or 'modesty', informs the work of key precursors such as Kant, Hume, Locke, Boyle, and Calvin, and relates to Protestant critiques of natural reason. The second, a tradition of theological voluntarism, emphasises the omnipotence and transcendence of God, as well as the arbitrary relationship subsisting between God and the created world. Brice argues that Coleridge's detailed familiarity with both of these interrelated intellectual traditions, ultimately served to undermine his confidence in his ability to read the symbolic language of God in nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic EducationGary PetersColeridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education, by Michael John Kooy. New York: Palgrave, 2002, 241 pp.Who reads Friedrich Schiller today? With the Aesthetic Education of Man struggling to remain in print in the English-speaking world (at least in the UK, from where I am writing this) it would seem fewer and fewer readers are prepared to engage with (or be educated by) this (...) once influential aestheticization of the world; and as for Marcuse on Schiller, or the young(er) Frederic Jameson on Schiller and Marcuse, they, too, seem to be speaking from another era, an ancient time when the humanist utopian promise could still be taken seriously. Promises are made to be broken, of course, especially the promesse de bonheur, but are we right to feel betrayed by the assorted Schillerians who so passionately raised our hopes, only to fall silent when they were so comprehensively dashed? Perhaps betrayal is putting it too strongly, but the fact remains that we seem to have ended up with a notion of aesthetic education that educates nobody, not even those within art education who need it more than most. But then perhaps the whole notion of aesthetic education as a promise is itself fundamentally flawed, the product of a political reading—the politicization of the aestheticization of the world—that casts the lessons of the aesthetic into the future rather than engaging with the event of the artwork as it erupts in a "now," which is aporetic in the extreme, and thus ill-equipped [End Page 119] to radicalize the unradic1al mind or mobilize the immobile.Clearly, Michael John Kooy reads Schiller today, but, having said that, it is never made entirely clear who he is writing for. Indeed, we may ask, does he have much of an audience at all or is he speaking too long and too late into the vacuum left by the collapse of humanist optimism? His own position is an interesting one, as both a literary theorist and a philosopher; one of the real strengths of the book is Kooy's pursuit of philosophical ideas in the body of Schiller's and Coleridge's dramatic and poetic work, often to good effect, but, to ask the question again, who is listening? Philosophers? Writers? Professional academics or the nonacademic audience that one would assume was always the intended beneficiary of the concept of aesthetic education?To attempt to think around some of these questions, without necessarily trying to answer them, we might start by considering who the philosophical audience for this book might be. My guess is that the philosophy of education, the subgenre of philosophy that might benefit from an aesthetic education itself, will be largely deaf to the message running through these pages. Long dominated by an ethical, religious, and liberal political agenda, the philosophy of education in its hegemonic Anglo-American guise has never made much room for the aesthetic, particularly in its "continental" radical incarnation—far too woolly, idealist, utopian, far too "arty." So, not much of an outlet here, but, having said that, the recent Anglo-American fascination with the very "continental" notion of Bildung might prove to be a fruitful point of contact, and Kooy does devote some useful pages and a substantial epilogue to a discussion of this thorny subject. There is a problem here, however, in that while Kooy is excellent when thinking through the dissonance between the teleological purposiveness of Schiller's and Coleridge's conceptions of universal history, so important to their notion of aesthetic education as a cultural model, and the very different self-substantiating autonomy of Bildung, he is much less engaged with the more fundamental pedagogical issues that arise within the particularity of the teaching encounter: How is the necessary autonomy of aesthetic education to be taught without thereby jeopardizing that very autonomy? It is at this point that a philosophical audience (one engaged in continental philosophy, that is) might have expected a more thorough account of the deeply problematical relationship between the Schillerian notion of aesthetic education and the aesthetics to be found in Kant's Critique of Judgement, its acknowledged source. This is not... (shrink)

Professor Orsini’s book enters the controversy that has marked the changing response to Coleridge’s work during the past forty years, stimulated recently by the accessibility of Coleridge manuscripts and by the publication of hitherto unpublished works. Professor Orsini himself contributes to our new knowl­edge by publishing here for the first time texts from the note­books. His book is of importance and interest because it examines problems which are rooted in world-wide intellectual developments of recent times. Counterposing his argument (...) against the theory that Col­eridge had anticipated Kant and Schelling, Professor Orsini marshalls impressive evidence that shows that Coleridge was familiar with the works of the German idealists and that they greatly influenced his thinking, to the extent that he was for a time an expounder of transcendental idealism, and should be credited with bringing it to England. Professor Orsini’s new findings will lead inevitably to reassessment of Coleridge’s status as a philosopher, though he insists that his report is an interim one, that a final estimate must wait until all Coleridge’s writings have been published and assessed. (shrink)

‘PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine and discipline of ideas’, as S. T. Coleridge understood it, is the theme of this book. It considers the most vital and mature vein of Coleridge’s thought to be ‘the contemplation of ideas objectively, as existing powers’. A theory of ideas emerges in critical engagement with thinkers including Plato, Plotinus, Böhme, Kant, and Schelling. A commitment to the transcendence of reason, central to what he calls ‘the spiritual platonic old England’, distinguishes him from his (...) German contemporaries. The book also engages with Coleridge’s poetry, especially in a culminating chapter dedicated to the ‘Limbo’ sequence. This book pursues a theory of contemplation that draws from discussions of imagination and the ‘Ideas of Reason’ in Coleridge’s published texts and extensively from his unpublished works, fragments, letters, and notebooks. He posited a hierarchy of cognition from basic sense intuition to the apprehension of scientific, ethical, and theological ideas. The structure of the book follows this thesis, beginning with sense data, moving upwards into aesthetic experience, imagination, and reason, with final chapters on formal logic and poetry that constellate the contemplation of ideas. Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy is not just a work of intellectual history, it addresses a figure whose thinking is of continuing interest, arguing that contemplation of ideas and values has consequences for everyday morality and aesthetics, as well as metaphysics. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, scholars of religion, and of literature. (shrink)

A Modern Coleridge shows the interrelatedness of the discourses of cultivation, addiction and habit in Coleridge's poetry and prose, and argues that these all revolve around the problematic nexus of a post-Kantian idea of free will, essential to Coleridge's eminently modern idea of the 'human'.

A self-conscious antagonism to Newtonian science is widely seen as characteristic of the Romantic movement, and Coleridge is routinely portrayed as one of the major representatives of this anti-Newtonian sentiment. Although such a view of Coleridge is correct, his hostility to Newton is puzzling. The attitudes that Coleridge objected to are often expressly denied in Newton's published writings, and Coleridge's own ‘dynamic’ philosophy was, in fact, remarkably like the conception of nature personally favoured by Newton. (...) class='Hi'>Coleridge, then, must have been objecting to something other than Newton's beliefs—to beliefs not in fact held by Newton, but by others. Commentators have noted Coleridge's distortion of Newton's philosophies, but have not explored this matter in any detail. The present paper attempts to redress this situation. As much of the historiography of Western philosophy presumes an unequivocal opposition between Romanticism and the Enlightenment, it is of importance to find that Coleridge and Newton held strikingly similar views about the nature of the universe. (shrink)

Coleridge's relation to his German contemporaries constitutes the toughest problem in assessing his standing as a thinker. For the last half-century this relationship has been described, ultimately, as parasitic. As a result, Coleridge's contribution to religious thought has been seen primarily in terms of his poetic genius. This book revives and deepens the evaluation of Coleridge as a philosophical theologian in his own right. Coleridge had a critical and creative relation to, and kinship with, German Idealism. (...) Moreover, the principal impulse behind his engagement with that philosophy is traced to the more immediate context of English Unitarian-Trinitarian controversy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book re-establishes Coleridge as a philosopher of religion and as a vital source for contemporary theological reflection. (shrink)

This book aims at providing the answer to one question: what did Coleridge derive from Kant and the post-Kantians in his most productive intellectual period, i.e., from approximately the eighteen-twenties? The question has already been investigated by a number of scholars-Shawcross, Muirhead, Wellek, Winkelmann, Schrickx and Chinol, in chronological order. Upon their work my book is founded. -Book's Preface.

Mary Anne Perkins re-examines Coleridge's claim to have developed a "logosophic" system which attempted "to reduce all knowledges into harmony." She pays particular attention to his later writings, some of which are still unpublished. She suggests that the accusations of plagiarism and of muddled, abstruse metaphysics which have been levelled at him may be challenged by a thorough reading of his work in which its unifying principle is revealed. She explores the various meanings of the term "logos," a recurrent (...) theme in every area of Coleridge's thought--philosophy, religion, natural science, history, political and social criticism, literary theory, and psychology. Coleridge was responding to the concerns of his own time, a revolutionary age in which increasing intellectual and moral fragmentation and confusion seemed to him to threaten both individuals and society. Drawing on the whole of Western intellectual history, he offered a ground for philosophy which was relational rather than mechanistic. He is one of those few thinkers whose work appears to become more interesting and his perceptions more acute as the historical gulf widens. This book is a contribution to the reassessment that he deserves. (shrink)

Peter Cheyne may have understood Coleridge better than the latter understood himself. This book provides an extensive road map to many of the highways and byways Coleridge wandered down in both prose and poetry, and it does so without ever losing sight of the ultimate goal of the journey: a philosophy of contemplative ideas, an ideal-realism that brought together these many disparate influences. For Cheyne, Coleridge is a thinker of the first rank, whose achievement—the philosophy of contemplation, (...) which presents a "view of intuitive reason and its ideas that shape humanity" —could have great value for the future direction of philosophy.Although Cheyne identifies three main periods in Coleridge's intellectual... (shrink)

Even if [Bentham and Coleridge] had had no great influence they would still have been the classical examples they are of two great opposing types of mind. . . . And as we follow Mill's analysis, exposition and evaluation of this pair of opposites we are at the same time, we realize, forming a close acquaintance with a mind different from either. From the introduction.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coleridge’s Intellectual Intuition, the Vision of God, and the Walled Garden of “Kubla Khan”Douglas HedleyIn his seminal work of 1917 Das Heilige Rudolph Otto quotes a number of passages as instances of the “Numinose.” Alongside those quotations from more conventional mystics, Plotinus, and Augustine, Otto refers to Coleridge’s “savage place” in Kubla Khan. 1 It is also pertinent that, when trying to define Romanticism, C. S. Lewis (...) appeals to the longing for the “unnameable something” fired by “morning cobwebs in late summer” or the “opening lines of Kubla Khan.” 2 Perhaps it is a mere coincidence that two of the most penetrating and influential scholars of religion in the twentieth century should appeal to Coleridge and his poem “Kubla Khan.” I wish to suggest reasons why the link between the imagery of “Kubla Khan” and a mystical experience of transcendence is not merely fortuitous. Indeed the connection between Coleridge’s mature writing and the imagery of the poem shows that we have good reason for seeing him as consciously writing, both as a poet and as a philosopher, within a visionary mystical tradition. I propose that it is no accident that Coleridge’s most visionary poem draws upon the central Christian image of paradise: the walled garden.This is an attempt not to interpret “Kubla Khan” but rather to suggest Coleridge’s place in the history of ideas as a Christian poet and philosopher. He is best described as an essentially speculative and mystical philosopher-theologian. 3 [End Page 115] By “speculative” I mean a theology inspired by those Church Fathers who emphasize the “vision” of God as an intellectual contemplation (speculari) of the transcendent Absolute, the prius of all being. The scholastics, the medieval German mystics, the Cambridge Platonists, and some of the German Idealists have all been influenced by such a speculative impulse. 4 Hegel uses the term “speculative” for his Dialectic. 5A philosophical or “speculative” approach to theology has invoked hostility from Tertullian onwards. Coleridge’s philosophy of religion often excited the fear of the new pantheistic German theology. John Henry Newman castigated Coleridge’s speculation as more heathen than Christian. Yet the speculative movement in theology spawned both a radical and a conservative wing, and we have to judge Coleridge’s thought in the light of the more conservative branch of nineteenth-century Idealism. D. F. Strauss jettisoned the transcendent “yonder” of traditional theology in favor of his philosophical or “scientific” approach to Christianity. Coleridge, however, could not adhere to theology of immanence; he wished to present a theology of an adamantly transcendent character.The walled garden is an eminently appropriate image of transcendence and was used as such by the fifteenth-century Christian Platonist Nicholas of Cusa, who is one of the links between Patristic theology and German Idealism. I shall draw upon his book The Vision of God as a paradigm of the sort of speculative mysticism which informs Coleridge’s metaphysics and much of his poetry. 6 Reflection upon an exotic poetic image may help us to clarify one of Coleridge’s philosophical tenets; the walled garden can be seen to symbolize that transcendent numinous reality, which the soul inchoately and barely consciously seeks and strives for.Coleridge’s “Mysticism” and the Imagery of “Kubla Khan”Richard Holmes claims that the “Kubla Khan” provides evidence of a transition in Coleridge’s interests and presents this switch from “classical and religious mythology” to the “drama of self-knowledge... the growth of consciousness and civilisation” as a key to Coleridge’s poetry. Holmes writes: [End Page 116][H]is instinct that the modern Epic subject must now centre on “the mind of man,” through “travels, voyages and histories,” shows a shift of poetic focus characteristic of the new Romantic age. The Epic could no longer draw on classical or religious mythology for the framework of its action. It must become contemporary with the world of scientific, anthropological, and psychological exploration: it must centre in some way on the drama of self-knowledge, on the growth of consciousness and civilisation. 7Coleridge would not have seen a conflict between the drama of self-consciousness and classical and religious mythology. In “Kubla... (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Claude Welch, the distinguished historian of nineteenth‐century religious thought, once declared that Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘may be seen as the real turning point into the theology of the nineteenth century’ and that he ‘was as important for British and American thought as were Schleiermacher and Hegel’.2 Still, Coleridge remains largely marginalized in the annals of church history and theology despite his unwavering prominence throughout much of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that (...) class='Hi'>Coleridge's posthumously published Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit , with its rejection of the verbal infallibility of Scripture and elevation of the importance of the individual in rightly discerning the truths of the Christian faith, has often been misread as an attestation of the primacy of the individual subject over the biblical text. It has been treated alternately as a document that signals the emergence of German higher criticism in England,3 a Romantic appeal to the fundamental importance of the subjective in religion,4 and an early form of reader‐oriented literary criticism.5 In this article I suggest that the attention devoted to Coleridge's denial of the verbal inspiration of Scripture, epitomized by the phrase that biblical inspiration is constituted by ‘whatever finds me’, has overshadowed his equally significant attention to the authority of church tradition in that same document. More specifically, rather than arguing for subjectivism in biblical interpretation, Coleridge equally emphasizes the objective sources of revelation expressed in Scripture and the church traditions handed over from the apostles. Rather than proposing a model of biblical inspiration that is wholly individualistic, Coleridge maintains a vision of Christianity that affirms the vitality of both the authority of the church and that of the believer. Thus, Coleridge's theological contribution to religious history is not that of an aberrant, absent‐minded poet, but rather that of a central participant engaged in an ongoing and pivotal debate in the history of England: the relationship between Scripture and church traditions.In order to draw out this important, though neglected, strand of thought in those ‘Letters on the Scriptures’, the name by which the Confessions is sometimes identified,6 I begin by briefly clarifying the nature of the idea of tradition both in relation to Coleridge and English theology in the nineteenth century. I then summarize the argument of the Confessions as a whole and turn more particularly to those sections of the Confessions that suggest the role Coleridge assigns to church tradition in relation to Scripture. Finally, after assessing the authority of the church in relationship to the divine Word, I turn to Coleridge's earlier works and his notes on the Works of William Chillingworth in order to demonstrate that his views on the respective authority of both the individual and the church were consistently held since near the time of his conversion to Trinitarian Christianity. I conclude that Coleridge's conception of the relationship between Scripture and church traditions calls for a reevaluation of his place in the history of religious thought in England. (shrink)

Coleridge rarely mentions Hegel in his philosophical writings and seems to have read very little of Hegel's work. Yet I argue that Coleridge's criticisms of Schelling's philosophy—as recorded in letters and marginalia—betray remarkable intellectual affinities with his nearly exact contemporary Hegel, particularly in their shared doubts about Schelling's foundationalist intuitionism. With this background in place, I seek to demonstrate that volume one of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria is a radically self-undermining text: its philosophical argument, far from slavishly recapitulating (...) Schelling's philosophy, remains haunted by a quasi-Hegelian skepticism toward intuition even as it advances intuition as the foundation of its theoretical edifice. (shrink)

Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Chicago, 2008 under title: The word made flesh and the mazy page: symbol and allegory in Coleridge's philosophy of faith.

Interweaving past and present texts, The Challenge of Coleridge engages the British Romantic poet, critic, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a "conversation" (in Hans-Georg Gadamer's sense) with philosophical thinkers today who ...

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The thesis begins by examining Coleridge's views on the role of feeling in intellectual activity. Hartley had argued that all forms of consciousness could be explained as effects of the body and its relation to external objects. Coleridge believed that thought was independent of physical causes. Feeling was the cause of association, and thought was an attempt to verbalize our intuitions. Chapter 2 examines his attempts to (...) distinguish the types of feeling connected with truth and with delusion. ;Chapter 3 discusses the emotional benefits which Coleridge found in philosophizing and their role in determining the contents of his thought. No system, he argued, can do justice to our intuition of transcendent realities; truthfulness depends on an unceasing effort of self-criticism, which itself produces a feeling of the sublime. Pleasure is an objective of Coleridge's philosophy as well as his poetry. Chapter 4 shows how the pleasures of thinking led him to view philosophy as a divinely-ordained transcendence of material things. ;Chapter 5 discusses the role of feeling in Coleridge's metaphysics. Coleridge searched continually for ways to reconcile the immanence and transcendence of God. He believed that God is revealed to us through philosophical effort, and that the qualities of energy and production involved in thinking make it both an instance and a symbol of God's creativity. ;The final chapter shows how Coleridge's conception of metaphysical truth expresses itself in his advocacy of a complex, continuous, and self-critical prose-style. Only by striving to express the truth do we achieve a conviction of its inexpressibleness. This effort, however, results in a style so complex that it requires an equivalent effort in order to be understood, thus involving the reader in an awareness of truth's sublimity. (shrink)