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Coleridge and the Endeavor of Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Bishop C. Hunt Jr.
Bishop C. Hunt Jr.*
Affiliation:
College of Charleston Charleston, South Carolina
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Extract

Platonism, in its eclecticism and hidden continuity, proved congenial to Coleridge, whose conception of the nature and role of philosophy differed profoundly from the empirical orthodoxy of his time (and ours). Coleridge's conception resembles the Greek ideal, found in Plotinus and others, of philosophy as less a purely rationalistic pursuit than a form of gnosis involving the whole man and leading toward ultimate perceptions. Platonism has important literary consequences: Coleridge's “philosophical” writings may be read as a complex (and often beautiful) form of prose poetry. Analysis suggests that the mode of argument in crucial chapters of the Biographia (xxi-xiv) is substantially poetic in nature and perhaps deliberately paralogical. Coleridge attempts certainty, without attaining it, and shows, astonishingly, an equivalent of Keats's “Negative Capability” in the disinterestedness of his symbolic investigations or “constructs” of reality. Literary form and style are more important in Coleridge's intellectual prose than has been thought.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 5 , October 1976 , pp. 829 - 839
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 In the rare 1591 Frankfurt ed. See The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series 50 (New York: Pantheon, 1957 62), i, item 928 and n. Henceforth cited as N, followed by item number. For Coleridge's interest in Bruno, see Alice D. Snyder, “Coleridge and Giordano Bruno,” Modern Language Notes, 42 (1927), 427-36.

2 N, 929 and n. The translation is George Whalley's, used in The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge : Hitherto Unpublished, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Pilot, 1949), pp. 324–27,450-52.

3 Raine Kathleen and Harper George Mills, eds., Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings, Bollingen Series 88 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p. 3. For a bibliography of Taylor's works, see pp. 523-33.

4 Lowes John Livingston, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1930), p. 229.

5 E.g., Wilde Norman, “The Development of Coleridge's Thought,” Philosophical Review, 28 (1919), 147-63; J. D. Rea, “Coleridge's Intimations of Immortality from Proclus,” Modern Philology, 26 (1929), 201-13; W. Schrickx, “Coleridge and the Cambridge Platonists,” Review of English Literature, 7 (Jan. 1966), 71-91, a particularly valuable article. For Coleridge's study of Plotinus. see Lucyle Werkmeister, “The Early Coleridge: His ‘Rage for Metaphysics,‘” Harvard Theological Review, 54 (1961), 99-123. The most thorough recent study appears in Paul Deschamps, La Formation de la pensée de Coleridge, 1772-1804 (Paris: Didier, 1964), pp. 374–406: “La Vision platonicienne.” See also David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonisin and English Romantic Thought (London: John Murray, 1974), esp. Ch. i; Newsome's primary concern, however, is with the development of English theology in the later 19th century.

6 Biographia Literaria, by S. T. Coleridge, ed. with his Aesthetical Essays by J. Shawcross (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1907), i, 241. Hereafter cited as BL.

7 Lesky Albin, A History of Greek Literature, trans. J. Willis and C. de Heer (New York: Crowell, 1966), pp. 812, 884. Coleridge parted with the G. Canterus ed. of Synesius (1567) in March 1794; Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957-71), i, 76. Hereafter cited as CL. Deschamps (La Formation, p. 387, n.) suggests that Coleridge approached Synesius through Cudworth's Intellectual System.

8 Lucas E. V., ed., The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 6 vols. (London: Methuen, 1903-05), ii, 21.

9 CL, i, 259, 262. For some account of the editions that Coleridge used, see N, 3267, n. Apparently he used the 1580 Basel ed. of Plotinus' Opera Philosophicorum, containing the Greek text with Ficino's Latin trans.; see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series 75 (London : Routledge, 1969), Vol. iv, Pt. i, 418, n.

10 BL, i, 94, 241–42. For Ficino and J. Taylor, see Deschamps, pp. 379-80. Coleridge borrowed Taylor's Sermons and Cudworth's System from the Bristol Library in 1795-96; see Whalley George, “The Bristol Library Borrowings of Southey and Coleridge, 1793-9,” The Library, 5th Ser., 4 (June 1949), 120, 123–24.

11 Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto, 1959), p. 107.

12 See Raine and Harper, Thomas Taylor, passim. Especially important for Coleridge were the Hymns of Orpheus (1787); the Proclus Commentaries on Euclid (“To Which Are Added, a History of the Restoration of the Platonic Theology, by the Later Platonists: and a Translation ... of Proclus's Theological Elements”), 1788-89; and his version of The Cratylus, Phaedo, Parmenides and Timaeus of Plato (1793), a book that was also in Wordsworth's library.

13 Now in the British Museum. Reproduced in N, i (Notes), 455-59; see also N, 1727-28 and nn. The Commentary on Euclid's Elements has recently been translated by G. R. Murrow (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970). For an account of Proclus' philosophy, see Taylor A. E., Philosophical Studies (London: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 151–91.

14 Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946); Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), pp. 15–17.

15 Cf. Lovejoy Arthur O., The Revolt against Dualism: An Inquiry concerning the Existence of Ideas, 2nd ed. (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1960), pp. 323–24; John Beloff, “The Mind-Body Problem as It Now Stands,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 49 (1973), 251-64.

16 Early Christianity and the Greek Paideia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 130–31.

17 Neoplatonism (London: Duckworth, 1972), p. 130. Hereafter cited as Wallis. Other useful works are: Thomas Whitaker, The Neo-Platonists: A Study in the History of Hellenism, 4th ed. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1928); E. R. Dodds, ed. and trans., Select Passages Illustrating Neoplatonism (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1923); The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1951); R. M. Grant, Gnosticism: A Source Book of Heretical Writings from the Early Christian Period (New York: Harper, 1961). Full bibliographies appear in the recent Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. H. Armstrong (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967).

18 Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, Collected Works, vi (1972), 59.

19 McFarland See, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), passim, and Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Chatto, 1972), esp. Ch. vii.

20 Jaeger, Early Christianity, p. 125. Lesky (History of Greek Literature, pp. 95, 889) mentions another of Ammonius' pupils, Herennius Philon of Byblos, author of the Phoenician History and of recently authenticated fragments, preserved by Eusebius, on Chaldean myths which date back as far as 1400 B.C. Herennius later went to Constantinople.

21 See Yates Frances A., Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1964), Ch. ii. The Corpus Hermeticum has been edited by W. Scott (Oxford, 1924-26), and (in French) by A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, I945-54). See also Festugière's La Révélation d'Hermès Trismégiste (Paris: Lecoffre, 1944-54).

22 Kojève, Essai d'une histoire rasionnée de la philosophic païenne (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). iii, 216 (my paraphrase).

23 Kojève, iii, 240.

24 McFarland, Coleridge, pp. xl, 110.

25 Cf. Cassirer Ernst, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F. Koelln and J. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1951), Ch. i, esp. p. 8.

26 Cf. McFarland, p. 42.

27 “The Spinozistic reduction to substance can be blocked only by a means that likewise prevents system from being completed. In the tension between the ‘I am’ and the systematic, therefore, God will always be conceived as following the ‘I am’ in order of reasoning and experience, will be separate from the world, and will be free from all pantheistic conceptions” (McFarland, p. 146).

28 CL, iv, 574: 1815.

29 BL, ii, 242. Shawcross discusses the debt to Kant in his notes.

30 BL, ii, 314; Shawcross' trans.

31 Wallis, p. 130. The triadic structure of “the Father” is affirmed in the Chaldean Oracles (Wallis, p. 106), which Coleridge would have known from Thomas Taylor's article of that title in the Monthly Magazine, Supplementary No. 19, 3 (June 1797), 509-26; see Raine and Harper, p. 525.

32 Wallis, p. 123; Proclus, Elements of Theology, Sec. 103.

33 Plotinus, Enn. v. 2.2.26-29, “The principle's role is... a highly paradoxical one; for while providing a link between extremes, an Iamblichean Mean Term simultaneously fulfils the opposite role of keeping them firmly apart. Its function is, in other words, on the one hand to safeguard divine transcendence, while on the other preventing the gulf between God and man from becoming unbridgeable” (Wallis, p. 131).

34 Rollins Hyder Edward, ed., The Letters of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), i, 193-94.

35 Cf. Wallis, p. 8.

36 The imaginary correspondent compares Coleridge's philosophy with “An Orphic tale” (BL, i, 200), a phrase taken from Coleridge's poem To William Wordsworth: surely no accident.

37 Lesky, History of Greek Literature, p. 882.