Coleridge and German Idealism: First Postulates, Final Causes

Abstract

More than any other writer, Coleridge introduced the English-speaking world to the Kantian and post-Kantian era of modern philosophy. In his related struggle to accommodate the transcendental or ‘critical’ philosophy to Christian belief, he formulated questions essential to the last century and a half of philosophy and Protestant theology. Engaging the German idealist tradition, Coleridge performs an implied critique of it. His acquaintance with Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), and Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), as well as with Spinoza (1632–77), Leibniz (1646–1716), and Jacobi (1743–1819), helps him to develop insights in criticism, semiotics, psychology, metaphysics and religion. (‘True metaphysics are nothing else but true divinity’, he asserts in the Biographia [ii, 291].) However, his German connection leaves us neither a systematic overview of these or other German thinkers — no extended study or treatise — nor a closely defined Coleridgean system itself. His own adumbrations, rarely fleshed out in full and punctuated by brilliant but fragmentary comments on German thought, have tempted commentators to reconstruct an ‘Esstecean Methodology’ (his own phrase, from ‘S.T.C.’). But others have disparaged a lack of systematic originality, implying that Coleridge is a philosophical parasite who capitalised on a language barrier.

In my beginning is my end… In my end is my beginning. Eliot, East Coker, from the motto of Mary, Queen of Scots