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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.
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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.
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Romantic reaction
Monday, 14 April 2025 at 17:20
Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Thomas Phillips
Romantic reaction
Taking his lead from Fichte, Coleridge viewed education as synonymous with the humanising process. It offered the encounter with the ‘other’, or ‘not-I’, that was essential to the development of the ‘I’. But this had been just one facet of Coleridge’s Romantic reaction to Spinozism. Where Coleridge surpassed Fichte was in the exploration of what it means to be human at all. A reading of Coleridge’s struggle with this issue was inspirational to my own attempt to answer the ‘who am I?’ question, particularly in relation to conceptions of God.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Humanising
Sunday, 13 April 2025 at 21:42
Rousseau (left) subverted by Coleridge
Humanising
Taking his lead from Fichte, Coleridge subverted Rousseau’s social contract, turning it instead into something which tends towards an ideal future, in which we contract freely with each other as autonomous individuals, each treating each always as an end in himself rather than as a means to an end. For such an ‘idea’ to be realised, individuals had to be transformed from ‘things’ into human beings. And taking his cue from Fichte, Coleridge would place national education at the heart of the humanising process.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Humanising
Saturday, 12 April 2025 at 21:55
Rousseau (left) subverted by Coleridge
Humanising
Taking his lead from Fichte, Coleridge subverted Rousseau’s social contract, turning it instead into something which tends towards an ideal future, in which we contract freely with each other as autonomous individuals, each treating each always as an end in himself rather than as a means to an end. For such an ‘idea’ to be realised, individuals had to be transformed from ‘things’ into human beings. And taking his cue from Fichte, Coleridge would place national education at the heart of the humanising process.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Against serfdom
Friday, 11 April 2025 at 21:32
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Against serfdom
Like Fichte too, Coleridge’s turn against Jacobinism and the French Revolution was expressed as a re-evaluation of Rousseau’s Social Contract. Coleridge described the Social Contract as ‘at once false and foolish’. No two humans should ever be bound by a contract as though it had some pre-existent force and, thereby, eternal validity. Only as an idea can such a contract serve the interests of individuals, rather than oppress them.
But if instead of the conception or theory of an original social contract, you say the idea of an ever-originating social contract, this is so certain and so indispensable, that it constitutes the whole ground of the difference between subject and serf, between a commonwealth and a slave- plantation. And this, again, is evolved out of the yet higher idea of person, in contra-distinction from thing; all social law and justice being grounded on the principle, that a person can never, but by his own fault, become a thing, or, without grievous wrong, be treated as such: and the distinction consisting in this, that a thing may be used altogether and merely as the means to an end; but the person must always be included in the end.
This clearly was a treatise against serfdom, even though written by Coleridge in the most rapidly advancing industrial nation of its day. There was no notion of economic progress necessitating political progress. He was writing in an early nineteenth century Britain, the epitome of Sarpi’s ‘Republick of Merchants’, truly behind enemy lines asa Romantic, and yet clearly he recognised the reality of a neo-feudalism in which individuals were treated as ‘things’ to be exploited.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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On the Constitution of the State and Church
Thursday, 10 April 2025 at 21:30
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
On the Constitution of the State and Church
Fichte’s philosophical response to Spinozism was inseparable from his political response. The same was true of another leading figure and disciple of Fichte in the Romantic reaction - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose most sustained presentation of politicised anti-spinozism was in his On the Constitution of the State and Church. From the outset in this polemical work, Coleridge stressed the power of imagination and ideas. Many people can conceive of what is meant by Church and State, he argued, but few possess the idea of either. This emphasis upon ideas was the bedrock of Coleridge’s politics, implying that all social constructs must originate in the mind of man as ideas, from the imagination. Man must not be subservient to entities that he confronts as pre-existent, or pre-supposed and external to him. Just as for Fichte, Coleridge believed that the state and other institutions were only what individuals think and make of them.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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