John Dunn

‘Knowledge causative of its own reality’

Coleridge and the other Romantics found the distinguishing feature of what it means to be human in the creative imagination, which is the very thing lacking in Spinozism and in the modern era described by Weininger as ‘a time without originality’.  In contradistinction to the prevailing Marxism of our times and the subhuman passivity to which it leads, Coleridge asserted that ‘the Will, the absolute Will, is that which is essentially causative of reality, essentially, and absolutely, that is, boundless from without and within’.  He attacked the passive empiricism of Enlightenment thinking by asserting that an ‘Idea is not simply knowledge or perception as distinguished from the thing perceived’, a critique that might well be levelled at the fact collecting ‘expert’ of our own times. Rather, an idea is ‘a realising knowledge, a knowledge causative of its own reality’.  And this is as far as Coleridge travelled in his rejection of Spinozist necessitarianism, still one step short of saying the Living God is in the Living Me - a self- defining concept upon which I will expand in my discussion of John’s Gospel later in this book.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

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