No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
A few months ago I read Peter Nicholson's The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists for the first time. In the index I found more than a hundred references to Hegel and only one to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, as many of the latter's writings, published for the first time in recent years, become generally accessible there is an increasing sense that he has been unfairly deprived of his due status as a philosopher. This is partly, no doubt, the syndrome of the prophet in his own country and partly the inevitable consequence of much of his later work remaining unpublished until recent years. Coleridge himself, with what some would take to be confirmation of an over-sensitivity to criticism, felt the neglect of his work went deeper and betrayed an anti-philosophical trait in British character.
Despite his close reading of the work of many of his German contemporaries it seems that he did not read more than sixtyone pages of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik. His margin notes to this work are, on the whole, negative in their criticism. However, despite significant disagreements, there is much common ground in theme, argument and conclusion between his many drafts of the ‘Logosophia’, his intended magnum opus, and Hegel's system.
1 The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists, Cambridge University Press, 1990 Google Scholar.
2 See Perkins, M A, ‘Logic and Logos': the search for unity in Hegel and Coleridge’ Heythrop Journal (XXXII)Google Scholar; part I: ‘Alienation and the Logocentric Response’ (Jan. 1991), pp 1-25 part II: ‘The “Otherness” of God’ (April, 1991), pp 192-215; part III: ‘A Different Logos’ (July 1991), pp 340–54Google Scholar.
3 The Statesman's Manual (SM) in Lay Sermons, ed White, R J (Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (CC), 5 Google Scholar; Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1972), p 114.
4 On the Constitution of the Church and State (C&S), ed Colmer, John (CC 10.; Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1976), p 47 Google Scholar.
5 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (CN) ed Coburn, K & Christenson, Merle (5 vols.; Princeton, NJ, Routledge & Kegan Paul & Princeton University Press, 1957-), iv 5293 Google Scholar
6 Table Talk (TT), ed Woodring, Carl (CC, 14; 2 vols; Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990), i. pp 173–74Google Scholar.
7 Marginalia (CM), ed Whalley, George (CC, 12; 4 vols; Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1980-), i p 682 Google Scholar.
8 Annotations to Solger, K W F Philosophische Gespräche (Berlin, 1817)Google Scholar.
9 C&S, p 47.
10 ‘On the Divine Ideas’, fo 229.
11 Aids to Reflection (AR), ed Beer, John (CC 9, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press), p 182 Google Scholar.
12 BL MS Egerton 2801, fo 82.
13 Marginalia to Tennemann, W G, Geschichte der Philosophie, (12 vols; Leipzig, 1798–1817), vi p. 45 Google Scholar; written on blank leaves at back of volume.
14 Biographia Literaria (BL), ed Engell, James & Bate, W Jackson (CC, 7; 2 vols; Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series, 1983), i 97 Google Scholar.
15 C&S, p 18.
16 SM, pp 113-14.
17 SM, p 101. For more on Coleridge's distinction between idea and eidolon – see BL i p 97: ‘Plato adopted [Ιδεα] as a technical term, and as the antithesis to εγδωλα, or sensuous images; the transient and perishable emblems, or mental words, of ideas. The ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt from time.’
18 CM, ii p 1134. Coleridge's marginalia on Hooker's Works are revealing in their description of the latter as ‘a comprehensive, rich, vigorous, discreet and discretive, CONCEPTUALISE but not an Ideist.-’ CM, ii p 1147.
19 CM, ii p 500.
20 CN, iv 5288.
21 CN, iv 5293.
22 Notebook (N) 37, f 44v.
23 N 50, f 34v (1831).
24 CM, ii p 152.
25 C&S, p 17.
26 N 34, fo 12v.
27 Ethics, prop 49.
28 Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, (LPWH), translated by H B Nisbet (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975), p 28.
29 LPWH, p 46.
30 Ibid (LPWH), p 46.
31 Schelling, F W J., On the History of Modern Philosophy (1833–1884) translated by Bowie, Andrew Google Scholar, in G W F Hegel Critical Assessments, ed Stern, R (Routledge, 1993 ) I iv pp 57–8Google Scholar. Schelling quotes the last paragraph of the first part of the Encyklopädie der philosophische Wissenschaften, [first edit §191; 2nd ed §244].
32 ‘Nature and the Dialectic of Nature in Hegel's Objective Idealism’, Dieter Wandschneider, in Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 26 (Autumn/Winter 1992), pp 30–51 Google Scholar.
33 Wandschneider, p 33; quotation from Hegel, , Werke, ed Glöckner, Hermann, (Stuttgart, 1955), vol 5, p 352 Google Scholar.
34 ‘On the Divine Ideas’, fo 37. Coleridge is aware of the apparent contradiction here: ‘because no particular form can be absolutely real – ie in the Godhead’, but he attempts a solution: ‘To God the idea is real, inasmuch as it is one with that Will, which, as we see in its definition, is verily Idem et Alter, but to itself the idea is absolutely real, in so far only as its particular Will affirms, & in affirming constitutes its partiular reality to have no true being, except as a form of the universal, & one with the universal Will. This however is the affirmation of a Will and of a particular Will. It must therefore contain the potentiality, that is, the power of possibly not affirming the identity of its reality with the reality of God, which is actual absolutely.’ (ODI ff 39-41)
35 See eg C&S, p 58; and N, 36, f 74v.
36 CN, iv 4910, f 73v.
37 Hegel's Logic, translated by Wallace, W. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975), p 275 Google Scholar.
38 For an explanation of the ‘Prothesis’ term see Coleridge's Philosophy, p 9, η 33.
39 Personal Knowledge (London, 1958), p 379 Google Scholar.
40 See Perkins, , Coleridge's Philosophy, p 121, 136-171, 208, 230 Google Scholar.
41 For those who Still flinch at this nod in the direction of the authority of the subject: – Coleridge's subject, is one which cannot be realised except through relationship; nor is this relationship based on an ontology, but rather a moral act. It is therefore not one in which the Subject gradually absorbs the Other (see Levinas, E, Totality and Infinity, translated by Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh, 1969), p 36 Google Scholar). In this respect Coleridge should escape Levinas's criticism of western ontology as involving ‘a reduction of the other to the same by an interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being’ (p 43).
42 It is important to note that for Coleridge this experience may be that of a constant inner witness, it need not be confined to the senses.
43 See ‘Logic and Logos’, part II: ‘The “Otherness” of God’ (April, 1991), pp 192-215.
44 See OM, vol 1; for a further example of Coleridge's references to Plato's refusal to allow the One to be called infinite, - God is ‘the Measure of Infinity’- see C&S, p 168.
45 ‘On the Divine Ideas’ f 35.
46 CN, iv 5294.
47 ‘On the Divine Ideas’, f 29.
48 Ibid (ODI) f 53.
49 CN, iii 4445
50 Hegel's Logic, section 144.
51 ‘The error of Schelling as of Spinoza before him and indeed of all the doctors of the Absolute is that they consider Ens and Non-Ens as having no possible intermediates or degrees’. Coleridge includes Hegel ‘as far as he means anything’ among those who make 'so much and such frequent use of the Nothing constituting all things out of 1 and 0 ‘. They then ‘attach to this 0 the infinity of all numbers as the ground of number and then by a mere numerical process explain everything simply because the 0 means every thing that is not in the 1 and that too.’ Schelling and Hegel refuse to allow that the potential may also be the real, as they confound ‘reality, as a primary Self-revelation or Idea having itself for its Object of Ideation with the generic term Reality’ – it is the latter, Coleridge acknowledges, which has no degrees. The Will is ‘real’ both as actual and potential. (CN, iii 4445).
52 Egerton 2801, f 81v.
53 See e.g. marginalia to Hooker's Works: CM, ii p 1148.
54 The following passage illustrates this blending of traditions: ‘whatever actually is, even for ourselves, is this wholly & solely by the presence of the Deity to the mind & that sense itself as if it were an opake reason is possible only by a communion with that life which is the light of men, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, & without which the solar light would be a contradiction in thought, a powerless power, a light that is darkness - this idea, next to that of the Will, or rather with it, is the great master key, not only of all speculative science[,] physical as well as metaphysical. Without a clear apprehension of truth, such as the mind can rest on with inward quiet, even the conception of the absolute Will as conveyed logically in the definition so often repeated, is neither safe nor worthy the name of an idea’ (ODI 63).
55 Coleridge particularly objects to what he takes to be Hegel's opposition of ‘Seyn’ and “Nichts’, for example,in the Wissenschaft der Logik (I i 41-43); see CM, ii pp 989-994.
56 See BL, i p 156 and n. In connecting ideas with imagination Coleridge implies that in and through ideas the problem of the Dingnin-sich is overcome.
57 CN, iv 5294.
58 SM, p 30.
59 CN, iii 4397 f 53.
60 Logic (Wallace), p 206.
61 Literary Remains, ed Coleridge, E N (4 vols; London, William Pickering & Sons, 1836–1839), vol 3, p 2 Google Scholar.
62 CN, iv 5294.
63 Levinas, E, Totality and Infinity, translated by Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh, 1969), p 36 Google Scholar.
64 Zizek, Slavoj, ‘The Truth Arises from Misrecognition’ in Lacan and the Subject of Language edited by Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie and Bracher, Mark (New York and London, 1991), p 197 Google Scholar.
65 ‘On the Divine Ideas’, f 11.
66 C&S, p 47.
67 C&S, p 13.
68 White, A, Absolute Knowledge: Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics (Athens, Ohio, 1983), p 9 Google Scholar.
69 See Perkins, Coleridge's Philosophy, Chapter 4: 3.
70 CN, iii 4489.
71 White explains: ‘whereas he [Hegel] presents that system as the culmination of a coherent tradition that began in ancient Greece, the most notorious post-Hegelian thinkers – including Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger – explicitly oppose that tradition’ (p 1).
72 ‘Einleitung in die Philosophie der Offenbarung oder Begründung der positiven Philosophie’ in Sämmtliche Werke, 14 vols (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J G Cotta'scher Verlag, 1856–1861; reprint edition of selected works, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974-76.), vol 13: 11)Google Scholar translated and quoted in White, , Absolute Knowledge, p 95 Google Scholar.
73 Schelling, , Sämmtliche Werke, 14: 363 Google Scholar; quoted in translation by White, A, Absolute Knowledge p 93 Google Scholar.
74 TT, ii p 119.
75 CM, ii p 1148.
76 Coburn, K (ed), Inquiring Spirit, 2nd edn (London, Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1979), p 214 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quoted from #52, f5v.