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Coleridge’s critique of polarity
Thursday, 15 May 2025 at 21:57
Coleridge’s critique of polarity
Fichte had no qualms about simply inverting Spinoza. His obsession was to protect the autonomy of the individual in response to Jacobin calls for subservience to the People. Coleridge’s critique of polarity reveals a different concern, more akin to that of Henry More, from where the concern probably arose in the first place. That concern was the loss, in the Spinozist Absolute Substance, of a ‘Living God’, the self- contained synthesis of subject and object, ‘having the Ground of his own Existence within himself, and the originating Principle of all dependent Existence in his Will and Word’.
Coleridge found his own resolution to the polarity issue in conscience, or moral sense, of a personal God who, by virtue of being the ‘originating Principle’, could have no presuppositions, ethical or physical, to pre-determine His will in matters of creation and destruction.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Quicksands of dead abstraction
Tuesday, 13 May 2025 at 21:11
Quicksands of dead abstraction
For conscience to have originated in Fichte’s Absolute ‘I’ would have been unacceptable to Coleridge. This was simply the opposite pole to Spinoza’s Substance. For Coleridge, the critical issue was not where the ground of being lies, whether that is with Spinoza’s Absolute Substance(object) or Fichte’s Absolute ‘I’ (subject). The critical issue was that both these grounds were dead abstractions. Coleridge recognised a need to overcome the polarity in which lay the quicksands of dead abstraction. He recognised the need to avoid being stranded at either pole, the poles of presupposition, the prefabricated world, which is where the neo-feudalists want everyone stranded. The albatross appeared at the pole, distant from the equator, and the Mariner shot it down.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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‘Without a You no They’
Monday, 5 May 2025 at 02:23
‘Without a You no They’
To have consciousness is to distinguish human being from animal being; to have a conscience is to move closer to the Divine. Coleridge built on this concept of conscience to offer a proof of a personal Godhead.
But as without a Thou there can be no You, so without a You no They, These or Those; and as all these conjointly form the materials and subjects of consciousness and the conditions of experience, it is evident that conscience is the root of all consciousness – a fortiori, the precondition of all experience – and that the conscience cannot have been in its first revelation deduced from experience.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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‘I thou’
Saturday, 3 May 2025 at 02:24
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
‘I thou’
In Essay on Faith,Coleridge presented an examination of the ‘I thou’ relationship that was an advance on the Fichtean concept of summoning, and more sophisticated than anything Martin Buber would later offer.
This is a deep meditation, though the position is capable of the strictest proof—namely, that there can be no I without a Thou, and that a Thou is only possible by an equation in which I is taken as equal to Thou, and yet not the same... but the equation of Thou with I, by means of a free act, negativing the sameness in order to establish the equality, is the definition of conscience.
Conscience has the same etymological root as consciousness, but with the added element of an inner morality. Conscience stands in contrast to elicited emotion or thought due to associations based on immediate sensory perceptions and reflexive responses. One could have consciousness of responding to sensory stimuli, but the conscience trumps both consciousness and sense perception, knowing that the actions resulting from these two latter can be judged to be right or wrong.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Antipathy to Spinoza
Tuesday, 29 April 2025 at 02:00
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Antipathy to Spinoza
The influence of German idealism upon Coleridge’s mature philosophical positions has been well documented. Be that as it may, it should not be understood as a totally independent source of influence. In fact, according to Coleridge himself, precepts defended by the German idealists originated in the Cambridge Platonists. When reading Henry More’s Philosophical Poems, Coleridge noted down on the front flyleaf the following:
Ah!What strength might I gather, what comfort we derive, from the Proclo-plotinian Platonist’s doctrine of the soul, if only they or their Spinosistic imitators, the nature- philosophers of present Germany, had told or could tell us what they meant by I and we (Marginalia, III, 909)
Fromthis comment, in which Coleridge registers his disappointment about the lack of progress towards answering his own ‘who am I?’ question, we learn that he interpreted the German Idealism of his own time as ‘Spinosistic’. This is surprising, especially given Fichte’s antipathy to Spinoza. So what was it to be ‘Spinosistic’? Coleridge explained in a letter of 1815 to the publisher John Gutch.
Spinoza's is a World with one Pole only, & consequently no Equator. Had he commenced either with the natura naturata, as the Objective Pole, or at the “I per se I” as the Subjective Pole—he must necessarily in either case have arrived at the Equator, or Identity of Subject and Object—and thence instead of a God, = the one only Substance, at which all finite Things are the modes and accidents, he would have revealed to himself the doctrine of The Living God, having the Ground of his own Existence within himself, and the originating Principle of all dependent Existence in his Will and Word.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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‘Mortal blow’ against Spinoza
Sunday, 27 April 2025 at 23:04
‘Mortal blow’ against Spinoza
If Coleridge believed, as he wrote in Biographia Literaria,that Fichte had struck a ‘mortal blow’ against Spinoza, then Coleridge himself had struck another in the guise of the ancient mariner. By the time Coleridge had shot down the shibboleth of an external materialist realism, he was mentally prepared to leave the larval Spinozism, for the flight into German idealism. That his art had anticipated life was explained in Biographia Literaria. Coleridge must have been referring to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner when he explained how works of imagination open up spaces into which we have yet to grow, just as ‘the chrysalis of the horned fly’ leaves ‘room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come’.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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About the Ancient Mariner
Friday, 25 April 2025 at 23:19
About the Ancient Mariner
The wedding guest harangued by the mariner was in danger of being one of the ‘crew’, blindly busied with convention, following the sacraments, Mr Average, unthinking, anonymous, a level one player by the ‘Triple Ichheit’ assessment of Coleridge’s later definition of threefold ‘I’-ness. The wedding guest was in a Dantesque dark wood, which is why he in particular was stopped by the mariner. The wedding guest was a conflation of the ancient mariner’s own pre-voyage condition and Coleridge’s own younger self, the Spinozist. The ancient mariner was haranguing his former self, his youthful Spinozist self, the self with ‘animal faith’. The wedding guest was told of the wilful, i.e. humanising act, the shooting down of the shibboleth of Spinozist enlightenment - which rent the veil of pantheism. The wedding guest then turned away from attending the sacrament of marriage (also a commentary upon the reckless and regretted marriage of Coleridge’s own younger self to Sara Fricker). In a wishful rewriting of real life events, the wedding guest departed, a sadder but a wiser man. He was no longer blindly happy in his animal faith. He had been humanised - reborn.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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