John Dunn

‘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.

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.

Shooting the shibboleth

Friday, 25 April 2025 at 02:32

Shooting the shibboleth

The shooting down of the shibboleth bird was unpremeditated and impulsive, a childlike act of spontaneity, creativity and imagination or, in Coleridge’s own terms, a divine act that asserted individuality and set the mariner apart. The mariner lived on, delivered from anonymity. The rest of the crew, the ‘they’, all died, anonymously, en masse. Whilst the ship of fools went down, redolent of a descent into Hell, he was reborn, destined to proclaim the shocking terror of the truth, a destiny that, ultimately, Coleridge felt he had failed to fulfil in real life.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Taking up his crossbow

Sunday, 20 April 2025 at 20:41

Taking up his crossbow

Coleridge in the poem shot at the reified sensitivities of the ‘they’ and their ‘animal faith’. Stop - what are we doing? was the implied question. In taking up his crossbow he was taking up the cross against a societal boat full of Pharisees. Shooting the albatross was a crime - the neo-feudalist crime of self- assertion. It marked the awakening of the individual. It was a transgression against the necessary, against determinism, but this was also a spontaneous intervention of human agency and the mariner was vilified for it. After the death of albatross, the shipmates in their sore distress shift all the responsibility for their woes onto the ancient mariner. ‘Instead of the cross, the Albatross / about his neck was hung’. The phrase ‘instead of the cross’ signifies that the albatross hung around mariner’s neck has intimate connection to the crucifix of Jesus.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Albatross Shot

Friday, 18 April 2025 at 19:58

Albatross Shot

Commentators upon The Ancient Mariner are often puzzled by the abruptness of the Mariner’s sudden and inexplicable act of shooting down such a benign and harmless overgrown seagull. But this is exactly what makes this event the central point of the poem, indeed the whole crux of the poem. The central point is that there was no reason. The shooting of the albatross was an allegorical blow against the age of reason. This was a wilful act and, therefore, a distinctly human act, certainly by Coleridge’s later definition in Biographia Literaria.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

First shot of the revolution

Thursday, 17 April 2025 at 22:07

First shot of the revolution

Pushed to its logical conclusion, the necessitarian philosophy of Priestley would finally terminate in the pantheism of Spinoza, which, indeed, was its root source, as it was for Locke, Hartley, Newton, Condillac and other necessitarians for whom the youthful Coleridge had once had an intense and committed enthusiasm. This was exactly the undifferentiated pantheism that Henry More had recognised in Spinoza’s kabbalism more than a hundred years before. Coleridge’s famous turn against the necessitarianism of Priestley, Hartley and others was a ‘bargain-basement’ revolt that augured the real thing in Coleridge’s later open revolt against Spinozism. And it was in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner that the first shot of the revolution was fired.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Priestley’s ‘bargain- basement Spinozism rejected

Wednesday, 16 April 2025 at 21:39

1801 portrait of Joseph Priestley

Priestley’s ‘bargain- basement Spinozism rejected

When composing the Ancient Mariner,Coleridge was already having doubts about what Thomas McFarland has described as Joseph Priestley’s ‘bargain-basement Spinozism’. Already in March 1796, when he was still calling himself a necessitarian, Coleridge confided in a letter his difficulty reconciling Priestley’s theism with his materialist monism: ‘How is it that Dr Priestley is not an atheist?—He asserts in three different Places, that God not only does, but is, every thing. But if God be every thing, every Thing is God: —which is all, the Atheists assert—’. The pressure of that question grew more insistent in the following years, and finally intolerable in April 1799, when Coleridge, then attending lectures in Göttingen, received word that his infant son Berkeley had died back in England. In a consolatory letter to his wife he wrote, ‘But the living God is everywhere, & works everywhere - and where is there room for Death? .. . I confess that the more I think, the more I am discontented with the doctrines of Priestley’. This reflection augurs a crucial turning-point in Coleridge’s intellectual life, after which he was no longer prepared to accept Priestley’s ‘bargain- basement Spinozism’. Coleridge was touching on a fundamental issue in this letter. If ‘every Thing is God’, then He, not the individual moral agent, must accept responsibility for human shortcomings. Such is the passivity of the individual under such a theo-tyranny that all his humanity is diminished. He is left with only an ‘animal faith’. The individual is reduced to a passive receptor of sense-experience, a Lockean tabula rasa.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.