John Dunn

Distinctly human act

Sunday, 11 August 2024 at 21:58

Distinctly human act

Commentators upon The Ancient Marinerare 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.

Revolt against Spinozism

Friday, 9 August 2024 at 21:35

Revolt against Spinozism

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.111 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.

Theo-tyranny

Thursday, 8 August 2024 at 21:50

Theo-tyranny

…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.

What the Atheists assert

Wednesday, 7 August 2024 at 21:58

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Phillips

What the Atheists assert

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—’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Albatross shot

Tuesday, 6 August 2024 at 21:48

Albatross Shot, Mervyn Peake 

Albatross shot

Bythe time Coleridge encountered the work of Fichte, he had already shot down the shibboleth of determinism that was blindly followed by a ship of fools. That shibboleth was Spinozism. I refer, of course to Coleridge’s most famous poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is ostensibly about the random shooting down of an albatross of good omen and the trials and tribulations which followed, but as with any poem worth reading, there is much more to it than first meets the eye.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

New National Church

Monday, 5 August 2024 at 21:06

New National Church

Coleridge presented the idea of a new National Church, which would have a secular role in providing an educative and cultural lead. Let us be clear at this point that Coleridge offered a new ‘idea’ here, and not some re-hashing of the Church of England. ‘My object’, wrote Coleridge, ‘has been to present the idea of a National Church, not the history of the Church established in this nation’. The new National Church would

...diffuse through the whole community and to every native entitled to its laws and rights, that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indispensable both for the understanding of those rights, and for the performance of the duties correspondent.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

‘Things’ into human beings

Sunday, 4 August 2024 at 21:45

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

‘Things’ into human beings

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.