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Man’s will and power
Thursday, 22 May 2025 at 22:47
Man’s will and power
Having rescued the concept of a choice-making God with an untrammelled will from the undifferentiated morass of Spinoza’s mindless Substance, Coleridge did likewise for man. Note that Coleridge argued for a repetition, i.e. likeness not oneness. There is a reflective principle involved here. This meant that for the imaginative mind of man, as a ‘repetition’ of God’s mind, there could be no presuppositions, ethical or physical, to pre-determine its will in matters of creation and destruction. Drawing upon Coleridge’s earlier definitions of God above, to be a ‘repetition’ would make man a 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’. Shooting the albatross was just such a demonstration of man’s will and power to act, which was a ‘repetition’ of God’s will and power.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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& Misery would be
Tuesday, 20 May 2025 at 20:56
& Misery would be
Coleridge lamented that Spinoza’s ‘error consisted not so much in what he affirms, as in what he has omitted to affirm or rashly denied . . . that he saw God in the ground only and exclusively, in his Might alone and his essential Wisdom, and not likewise in his moral, intellectual, existential and personal Godhead’. In short, Spinoza’s Ethics lacked the theoretical basis for an ethics. The Spinozist God, as the eternal actualisation of the universe, need not impinge upon the temporal actualisation of events at a human level. Such a condition was tantamount to Hell for Coleridge, a world in which all hope had been abandoned.
If like Spinoza, I had contemplated God as the infinite Substance (Substantia Unica) as the incomprehensible mindless, lifeless, formless Substans of all Mind, Life and Form—there would be for me neither Good nor Evil – Yet Pain, & Misery would be—& would be hopeless.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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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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