John Dunn

Top rung of the Triple Icheit

Thursday, 29 May 2025 at 21:54

Top rung of the Triple Icheit

‘The whole enterprise of the human spirit issues from the imagination,’ according to Fichte. This was the central tenet of his Science of Knowledge and marked no less than the resurrection of the self, an overcoming of Spinozist hypostasis, an escape from a Dantean Hell. Coleridge, in developing Fichte’s insight further, was the most ambitious in asserting that the human mind imitates the divine mind in God-like acts of creation, an imitative repetition of its original counterpart. This is the domain of the Secondary Imagination, or the top rung of the Triple Icheit ladder, where the creative act is ‘essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

‘An act and process’

Monday, 26 May 2025 at 20:57

‘An act and process’

And yet if metaphors are discarded, what of the metaphor of selfhood? We are on a process of infinite regress in the search for an answer to the ‘who am I?’ question. If the ‘originating Principle’ is not to be pinned down by metaphors of God or self, what is it, where is it from? Words failed Dante because he was trying to describe the ineffable, a truth not to be found in thinghood. Coleridge also abandoned the search for truth as a thing. 'Life itself is not a thing - a self-subsistent hypostasis’, wrote Coleridge in his Theory of Life. It is rather ‘an act and process’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

One presupposition left

Sunday, 25 May 2025 at 21:34

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

One presupposition left

In Coleridge’s schema there was only one presupposition left confronting man, i.e. God, who remained the ground of a moral and intellectual existence. Coleridge was only one step short of fully embracing a spiritual humanism and kicking away the need for such a grounding; one short step from discovering the moral, intellectual, existential and personal Godhead that he sought, in himself. The ‘Living God’, i.e. 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’, was internal to man by the definition of his own three- step schema.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

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.

& 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.

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.

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.