Fascinating stuff from philosophy and literature professor Peter Cheyne, writing for Aeon magazine:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stands tall in the cultural pantheon for his poetry. It’s less well known that in his own lifetime, and in the decades following his death, this canonical poet had an equal reputation as a philosopher. . . .
Coleridge’s interconnecting themes are: the power of the creative word, in both worldly and poetic construction, echoing the divine word; nature as the living alphabet of God, only dimly understood in human knowledge; ideas as metaphysical essences and powers that pre-exist the physical world; and the notion of the earthly reflecting the ideal, as the icicles shine to the moon, itself reflecting the otherwise unseen light, at night, of an unseen sun. . . .
Coleridge defined the imagination in its fundamental sense as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.” In this view, human artistic creativity, scientific discovery and philosophical insight share in an attenuated form of the original, divine power of creation by virtue of being able to attend in imagination to ideas, or symbols of ideas, of ultimate reality. Everything that exists owes its being to the ideas. Nature, though charged with ideas, is sleeping; animal life, sleepwalking; with most of human life in a slightly higher state of dreaming. It’s only when we’re self-consciously aware of ideas that we’re fully awake. As Coleridge described the sway of ideas in 1827, “all live in their power – the Idea working in them,” but only “the Fewest among the Few . . . live in their Light.”
Conceiving of these ultimate and eternal powers as “ideas” subjectively (as fundamental to mind) and as “laws” objectively (as fundamental to world), Coleridge placed at the heart of his philosophy a theory of powers beyond the human mind but accessible to it in contemplation, imagination and in vague intuitions. These “living and life-producing Ideas” were “essentially one with the germinal causes in Nature.” In an intriguing consequence of his theory of ideas, he didn’t dismiss physical matter as mere appearance or abstract concept with no corresponding reality beyond subjective experience. Rather, as Coleridge saw it, matter is a synthesis that arises out of the opposition of the fundamental forces of existence. It’s the elementary forces that are primal, and the matter that arises out of them is the efflorescence in which we take part, only dimly aware that we’re “connected with master-currents below the surface” . . . .
Over the course of the next three-and-a-half decades, Coleridge developed his philosophy of ideas that countered the view of the Universe as “an immense heap of little things” and replaced it with a cosmos of ideas, powers and forces that give rise to the material world. In this way, he ended up providing his alternative to the mechanistic materialism, expounded to varying degrees by Galileo, Descartes, Locke and Newton, that he saw as removing too many “positive properties” from the world, which then, abstracted into mere “figure and mobility,” becomes “a lifeless Machine whirled about by the dust of its own Grinding.”
Source: Coleridge the Philosopher (or The Spectacular Originality of Coleridge’s Theory of Ideas)
Have you read Coleridge And The Daemonic Imagination by Gregory Leadbetter? I found it in my university library and used it on a school project and really loved it.
I’ve held that book in my hands and skimmed it, but I’ve never actually read it through. From that limited contact, I agree that it’s a valuable entry in this general conversation.