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Coleridge's “ideal Realism”: an alternative to the “doctors of the Absolute”?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
Abstract
A few months ago I read Peter Nicholson's The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists for the first time. In the index I found more than a hundred references to Hegel and only one to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, as many of the latter's writings, published for the first time in recent years, become generally accessible there is an increasing sense that he has been unfairly deprived of his due status as a philosopher. This is partly, no doubt, the syndrome of the prophet in his own country and partly the inevitable consequence of much of his later work remaining unpublished until recent years. Coleridge himself, with what some would take to be confirmation of an over-sensitivity to criticism, felt the neglect of his work went deeper and betrayed an anti-philosophical trait in British character.
Despite his close reading of the work of many of his German contemporaries it seems that he did not read more than sixtyone pages of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik. His margin notes to this work are, on the whole, negative in their criticism. However, despite significant disagreements, there is much common ground in theme, argument and conclusion between his many drafts of the ‘Logosophia’, his intended magnum opus, and Hegel's system.
- Type
- Hegel and British Idealism
- Information
- Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 16 , Issue 1: number 31 , Spring/Summer 1995 , pp. 1 - 16
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1995
References
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18 CM, ii p 1134. Coleridge's marginalia on Hooker's Works are revealing in their description of the latter as ‘a comprehensive, rich, vigorous, discreet and discretive, CONCEPTUALISE but not an Ideist.-’ CM, ii p 1147.
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42 It is important to note that for Coleridge this experience may be that of a constant inner witness, it need not be confined to the senses.
43 See ‘Logic and Logos’, part II: ‘The “Otherness” of God’ (April, 1991), pp 192-215.
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54 The following passage illustrates this blending of traditions: ‘whatever actually is, even for ourselves, is this wholly & solely by the presence of the Deity to the mind & that sense itself as if it were an opake reason is possible only by a communion with that life which is the light of men, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, & without which the solar light would be a contradiction in thought, a powerless power, a light that is darkness - this idea, next to that of the Will, or rather with it, is the great master key, not only of all speculative science[,] physical as well as metaphysical. Without a clear apprehension of truth, such as the mind can rest on with inward quiet, even the conception of the absolute Will as conveyed logically in the definition so often repeated, is neither safe nor worthy the name of an idea’ (ODI 63).
55 Coleridge particularly objects to what he takes to be Hegel's opposition of ‘Seyn’ and “Nichts’, for example,in the Wissenschaft der Logik (I i 41-43); see CM, ii pp 989-994.
56 See BL, i p 156 and n. In connecting ideas with imagination Coleridge implies that in and through ideas the problem of the Dingnin-sich is overcome.
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