Hamilton - Coleridge and German Philosophy

Coleridge and German Philosophy

Paul Hamilton

Continuum

Paul Hamilton 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Paul Hamilton has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pubhcation Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

I am very grateful to various people for ideas and help important to me that they probably were not aware of giving at the time, among them Andrew Bowie, Howard Caygill, Jim Chandler, Lilla Crisafulli, Michael Kooy, Peter Dews. At Queen Mary University of London I have been fortunate in working with a cohort of inspiring graduate students who have never let me stand still. Two current ones, Rowan Boyson and Molly Macdonald, kindly read and commented on parts of the draft.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Patrick Hamilton (1916-2005), who encouraged me to delight in a shared philosophical passion a long, long time ago.

My Dream History of Scotus, deranged as a youth / imagining himself in the Land of Logic, lying on the Road & in the Road to the Kingdom of Truth, falls into a criminal Intercourse with a Girl, who is in Love with him, whom he considers as the Daughter of the King of the Land / impersonation & absolute Incarnation of the most Abstract -. Detected he defends himself on this ground. O it was a wild dream, yet a deal of true psychological Feeling at the bottom of it... (CN, I, 1824)

This book is about Coleridges informal philosophical adventures. Informal in the sense that their systematic presentation was never completed, and also in the sense that their psychological satisfactions are palpable and approachable not exclusive and remote. If we become familiar with the predominantly German philosophical idiom in which they appear, then their adventurousness merits the racy tale told in the Coleridgean epigraph above. As this cryptic, early Notebook entry suggests, the story of Coleridges philosophical connections was always going to be complicated and compromised. Spontaneously his intellectual biography assumes dramatic form, staged vicariously through the dream of another logician, Duns Scotus. The contemporary master-trope of philosophical dispute in Coleridges time was Pantheism. Truth, as Schellings major opponent in the revived quarrel over Pantheism, Jacobi, maintained, need not, perhaps should not, be gained philosophically. If that is so, then philosophy can be accused of a sort of intellectual dalliance, at best distracting from true seriousness, at worst a criminal pleasure. A defence of philosophical activity, though, lies in Scotus claim that such intercourse is in any case of such a degree of abstraction that its otherwise scandalous desire may actually coincide with an ultimate mission to understand the final things. After all, impersonation & absolute Incarnation describes accurately Schellings alternative to jacobis theology: a God of becoming, one whose self-production in shapes proportionate to human faculties of apprehension is what renders him a personal God, in line with the demands of Christian dogma.

I will frequently, however, try to avoid explaining Coleridges philosophical adventures by attributing to him a partisan position within the repeatedly Instead, I will concentrate on the eroticism of Coleridges philosophical engagements, if you like; the sheer overwhelming pleasure the man obviously took in surfing the waves of German idealism and post-Kantianism that followed each other in close succession. A book taking this approach is not going to be zealous in uncovering exact sources, preferring to look for the amplification by each other of Coleridgean and German philosophical views and ideas. Coleridges sympathies and antipathies towards certain philosophical positions are not always extricable from each other, as the guilty entanglement above suggests.