Congratulations to Peter Cheyne and his contributors on the forthcoming Coleridge and Contemplation<\/em> collection, which Peter describes below.\u00a0 BARS helped to support a workshop that was part of the book’s development process<\/a>.<\/p>\n A collection of essays on Coleridge\u2019s contemplative philosophy written by philosophers, intellectual historians, and leading literary authorities on Coleridge.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The editor and authors of Coleridge and Contemplation<\/em> would like to thank BARS for a grant that assisted a workshop at the University of Cambridge English Faculty, 10\u201311 August, 2015. The workshop enabled contributing authors of Coleridge and Contemplation<\/em> to present their research so that internal connections within the overall work could be better understood and developed.<\/p>\n Sarah Hutton, Graham Davidson, and Matthew Gibson were present as auditors, providing the authors with keen interrogations and constructive criticism. Further reviews of papers as they developed into book chapters were provided by romanticists Anthony J. Harding and Alan P. R. Gregory, philosopher Stephen Priest, and the two anonymous Coleridge scholars arranged by OUP.<\/p>\n The book is now available for order, and Oxford University Press have provided a 30% discount code, AAFLY6G, which can be used at the OUP webpage for the book<\/a>. The remainder of this report is a description of the four parts of the book\u2014I. Poetics and Aesthetics; II. Worldviews: Science, Ethics, and Politics; III. Metaphysics; and IV. Philosophy of Religion\u2014and of its foreword by Mary Warnock.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Foreword <\/strong><\/p>\n In her discursive foreword Mary Warnock<\/strong> addresses:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Part I: Poetics and Aesthetics<\/strong><\/p>\n Jim Mays<\/strong>\u2019 essay follows the ascent from the technical understanding of a poem and its processes, toward a sense of \u2018spiritual contemplation\u2019. Slow-reading a short Coleridge poem,\u00a0\u2018First Advent of Love\u2019, written later in life, and representing lifelong concerns, Mays adopts Adorno\u2019s argument that technique is the way art thinks, to describe the kind of meditation involved in both reading and writing the poem. He contrasts this kind of meditation with the different, analytical process involved in Coleridge\u2019s prose writing. He reveals how in \u2018First Advent\u2019 feelings adjust through a web of sounds, images, and allusions (to neo-Platonic ideas about love mediated through Renaissance and contemporary German authors). Inquiry into what is most important in the poem involves the matter of how the poem works: a matter of \u2018Understanding\u2019. Mays then looks to higher, numinous qualities in the poem that go beyond the understanding, and are properly imaginative in terms of Coleridge\u2019s diagram of the \u2018Order of the Mental Powers\u2019, mediating between \u2018Understanding\u2019 and \u2018Reason\u2019 in terms of en\u00e9rgeia<\/em>, the topic of my\u00a0own essay.<\/p>\n David E. Cooper<\/strong>\u2019s essay, \u2018Meditation on the Move\u2019, relates a mode of meditation with walking in natural environments. This mode is identified by drawing on texts from Coleridge, Bash\u014d, Rousseau, and Thoreau. The style of meditation is a spontaneous, supple and responsive mindfulness of the world through which one moves. The connection is noted between this style of meditation, in which Coleridge too engaged, and the \u2018rambling\u2019 or \u2018wandering\u2019 kind of thinking encouraged by the Daoist master, Zhuangzi.\u00a0Relevant considerations of why walking in natural environments seems to be especially conducive to such meditation include rhythmic calm, and an \u2018unselfing\u2019 whereby, as Coleridge puts, it, \u2018individuality is lost\u2019 when immersed in the environments through which one walks.\u00a0Finally, Cooper argues that meditation on the move is hospitable to certain conceptions of reality. In particular, it encourages a sense of the world as an integral whole that comes to presence for walkers as a mysterious \u2018gift\u2019.<\/p>\n James Kirwan<\/strong> examines Coleridge\u2019s analysis of beauty in the \u2018Principles of Genial Criticism\u2019 (1814), which aimed to establish a religious dimension to aesthetic experience. Coleridge\u2019s argument is traced through his Kantian account of aesthetic judgement, and his assertion of unity-in-multiplicity as the formal condition of beauty, to his grounding beauty in that which is \u2018pre-configured\u2019 to our faculties. Coleridge\u2019s depends on eighteenth-century aesthetic axioms, despite deliberately avoiding explicit reference to such accounts, electing Plotinus instead as a precursor. Coleridge is therefore reluctant, Kirwan suggests, to explain aesthetic experience in purely psychological and, potentially, exclusively naturalistic terms. The appeal to Plotinus\u2019s traditional notion of beauty as the soul\u2019s recognition of its divine origin, grounds aesthetic experience in religion. Concomitantly, in Coleridge\u2019s reassertion of the claims of religion in the wake of the Enlightenment, aesthetic experience as contemplation of the world as it is becomes proof of the existence of the divine.<\/p>\n Kathleen Wheeler<\/strong> reads Dewey\u2019s Art as Experience<\/em> as steeped in Coleridge, a constant reference throughout this foundational pragmatist aesthetics. Indeed Dewey said he found \u2018spiritual emancipation\u2019 in Coleridge\u2019s Aids to Reflection<\/em>, calling it \u2018my first Bible\u2019 (qtd John Beer Aids to Reflection<\/em> cxxv). Coleridge\u2019s account of perception as active and creative\u2013\u2013not passively receptive, gave Dewey profound insight into human experience, and helped him articulate his philosophy of \u2018art as experience\u2019 whereby art originates in imaginative ordinary life. For Coleridge, \u2018act\u2019 and \u2018activity\u2019 ground both mind and matter in the same natural powers of production\/ creation: \u2018a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am\u2019. Dewey\u2019s analogy between the error of separating art from ordinary life, and divorcing imaginativeness from ordinary perception shows how memories<\/em> of prior acts of imaginative perception usurp the place of actual<\/em> acts, as dead metaphors do in language.<\/p>\n Roger Scruton<\/strong> reflects on Coleridge\u2019s famous fancy\u2013imagination distinction, which inspired Scruton\u2019s own distinction between fantasy and imagination. The continuing relevance of Coleridge\u2019s distinction lies in recognizing imagination as essentially truth-directed<\/em>. Importantly, we can venture into the unreal with two quite different intentions\u2013\u2013to become lost there, or to find ourselves. We can see the unreal world as a place of escape, fulfilling dreams in cost-free ways that set up channels of reward which so often lead to addiction and psychological enslavement (as in pornography). Or, we can see the world of the unreal as an imaginative construct for deeper epistemological purposes, to know through sympathy the varieties of human life, as life that could be ours. Scruton reserves the term \u2018imagination\u2019 for this second approach. This imaginary is the unreal called to judgment by the real, in contrast with the pretence of reality in clich\u00e9d, sentimental, or kitsch fantasy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Part II: <\/strong>Worldviews: Science, Ethics, and Politics<\/strong><\/p>\n David Knight<\/strong> begins the section on Coleridge\u2019s contemplative worldviews, and chronologically follows Coleridge\u2019s lifetime fascination with medicine as its focus shifted from anatomy, the analysis of structures, towards physiology, elucidating the processes of life. He believed that all sciences should progress from a static to a dynamic world-view, making them worthy of contemplation, feeding Reason rather than just understanding. Through Thomas Beddoes in Bristol he met young Humphry Davy, whose dynamical researches on laughing gas and electrochemistry delighted him. Coleridge became a critic of science as well as literature, rejoicing as Davy isolated new metals, cast light on acidity, and invented the miners\u2019 safety lamp. But after 1820 Davy turned haughty, and Coleridge deplored chemists\u2019 empire-building as science became a professional career; while in medicine French materialism threatened the dynamic vitalism of John Hunter that Coleridge and his host James Gillman favoured. Sadly science, once so promising, looked decreasingly suitable for his kind of philosophical contemplation.<\/p>\n Philip Aherne<\/strong> examines Coleridge\u2019s influence in Cambridge through the nineteenth century, especially as it affected the development of a philosophy he opposed, utilitarianism. Aherne accepts Skorupski\u2019s (1993) assessment of Coleridge as an important precursor of British idealism, finding his philosophy a particular\u00a0blend of German transcendentalism, Platonic creeds, and Christian ethics representing a distinct school in its own terms. His contemporary significance was undoubtedly influential. In 1890, James Martineau argued for Coleridge\u2019s influence in British philosophy through the nineteenth century, claiming that \u2018his Platonic gospel has passed in the heart of our generation\u2019 and declared that \u2018empirical psychology and utilitarian ethics are the permanent objects of Coleridge\u2019s hostility\u2019. Martineau was extending Mill\u2019s dichotomous paradigm of Bentham versus Coleridge. Aherne, however, questions the stability of this opposition, claiming that Mill\u2019s development of Utilitarian ethics depended on Coleridge\u2019s epistemological distinction between Reason and Understanding.<\/p>\n Kaz Oishi<\/strong> assesses contemplation in Coleridge\u2019s philanthropic thought in the 1810s. Even after his disillusionment with the French Revolution, he remained preoccupied with welfare issues such as destitution and the condition of labourers. His new stance towards national \u2018well-being\u2019 emphasizes the contemplative power of the human mind both in religious and secular spheres. Oishi describes how Coleridge developed it in response to Robert Owen\u2019s welfare and educational programmes as manifested in\u00a0New View of Society<\/em>\u00a0(1813). Coleridge\u2019s\u00a0The Statesman\u2019s Manual<\/em>\u00a0(1816) and\u00a0A Lay Sermon<\/em>\u00a0(1817) can be read as a critique of Owen\u2019s secular and empiricist notion of philanthropy. It is also significant that this contemplative ideal of \u2018well-being\u2019 serves as an antithesis to the Utilitarian concept of wealth under a laissez-faire economy. Coleridge\u2019s contemplation as \u2018a total act of the soul\u2019 distinguishes itself as a unique politico-religious virtue in the context of the 1810s.<\/p>\n Andy Hamilton<\/strong> assesses Coleridge\u2019s place in conservative and liberal traditions of thought.\u00a0In the decades after his death, Coleridge was regarded as a conservative.\u00a0Mill saw him as a \u2018Tory philosopher\u2019; he viewed Coleridgean conservatism as some have seen Burke\u2019s, as a Second\u2013\u2013not Counter\u2013\u2013Enlightenment view.\u00a0Burke does not figure as a conservative in Mill\u2019s discussion.\u00a0However, late nineteenth-century constructors of an ideology of English conservatism preferred to appeal to Burke\u2019s scepticism about reason, while Coleridge\u2019s philosophical prestige was waning.\u00a0Coleridge\u2019s affiliation with Continental-style \u2018rational conservatism\u2019 is also assessed.\u00a0Competing\u00a0conceptions of reason condition his\u00a0rationalism.\u00a0The picture is similar when one considers the relation between his conservatism and his radicalism.\u00a0With every major conservative thinker\u2013\u2013Burke, Coleridge, Oakeshott\u2013\u2013this question of progressiveness versus conservatism arises.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Part III: Metaphysics<\/strong><\/p>\n Peter Cheyne<\/strong>\u2019s essay discusses Coleridge\u2019s \u2018Order of the Mental Powers\u2019 (OMP) in the context of what he identifies as the energic\u2013energetic distinction. The OMP diagram is used to show Coleridge as a two-levels theorist, with the higher and lower\u00a0levels capable of participation across a fundamental difference. Coleridge is thus a thinker communicating the dynamics of thought within an overarching concern for the \u2018energies of Reason\u2019. The restless, flowing, and challenging quality of his writings is therefore balanced by, and subordinated to, the higher level of intellection that he held as a spiritual conatus straining towards ultimate ends and meaningful values. In this two-level theory, energetic desire, pleasure, psychological forces of association, and the \u2018mechanical\u2019 understanding operate more naturally on the lower level, while the higher understanding, imagination, and \u2018Positive<\/em> Reason\u2019 work within the en\u00e9rgeia<\/em> of free will in the higher mind.<\/p>\n Dillon Struwig<\/strong> presents Coleridge as a two-levels theorist of the innate powers of mind, <\/em>arguing that Coleridge distinguishes (1) a transcendental, Kantian sense of the a priori<\/em>, consisting in the\u00a0<\/em>principles of human discursive cognition (comparable to\u00a0Plato\u2019s dianoia<\/em>), from (2) a noetic, Platonic a priori<\/em>, consisting in the principles of intellectual intuition (or n\u00f3<\/em>\u0113<\/em>sis<\/em>, an intuitive cognition that apprehends ontological, theological, and ethical truths). Drawing on Logic <\/em>and Opus Maximum<\/em>, Struwig demonstrates that Coleridge takes Kantian a priori <\/em>principles to be \u2018subjectively real\u2019 principles of cognition dependent upon the cognitive constitution of finite subjects, whereas Platonic a priori <\/em>principles are for Coleridge \u2018objectively real\u2019 principles of cognition (and of being) that are dependent upon \u2018the transcendent and unindividual\u2019 reason (i.e. God, \u2018the absolute Self, Spirit, or Mind\u2019). This two-levels theory is framed in terms of Coleridge\u2019s Kantian \u2018threefold division\u2019 of the human cognitive capacities into sense, understanding, and reason, and their respective a priori <\/em>operations and contents.<\/p>\n Cristina Flores<\/strong> explores the influence of Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth\u2019s philosophical system on Coleridge\u2019s notion of contemplation. Coleridge studied Cudworth\u2019s True Intellectual System<\/em> early in his career, from 1795 to 1797, before his acquaintance with German thought. Flores contends that Coleridge\u2019s theory of contemplative experience has an initial basis in the Cambridge Platonist\u2019s ontological and epistemological tenets. Coleridge\u2019s conversation poems, written during his perusal of Cudworth\u2019s magnum opus, lay the groundwork for a metaphysical theory of contemplation. In these, which he called \u2018Meditative Poems in Blank Verse\u2019, Coleridge dramatizes meditative experience as he conceived it at this early stage of his career. Flores establishes a comparison between Coleridge\u2019s early view of contemplative experience, and the related \u2018Order of the Mental Powers\u2019 in considering the influence of Cudworth\u2019s philosophical tenets in Coleridge\u2019s Platonist foundations.<\/p>\n Douglas Hedley<\/strong> takes as his theme the deep roots in the Platonic tradition of Coleridge\u2019s view of contemplation as the experience of n\u00f3\u0113sis<\/em>, for Plato the highest form of epist\u0113m\u0113, being the knowledge of \u2018Ideas\u2019 beyond dianoia<\/em> (discursive and conceptual understanding). Coleridge\u2019s theory of the symbol only makes sense within this metaphysical-theological context. Plotinus\u2019s decisive contribution within Coleridge\u2019s metaphysics is often overlooked. Contemplation, for Plotinus, is connected to Gift. Contemplation is always a return to the \u2018Giving\u2019 of the One (rooted in Plato\u2019s \u2018unbegrudging\u2019 Goodness of the demiurge, Timaeus<\/em> 29), and this process of gift and return is mirrored throughout different levels of reality. Like the Cambridge Platonists before him, Coleridge furnished this contemplative return with a Trinitarian articulation. Coleridge\u2019s own contemplative theology is especially inspired by the revival of neo-Platonism in German idealism.<\/p>\n James Engell<\/strong> concludes the section on metaphysics with a comprehensive and illuminating treatment of Coleridge\u2019s philosophy as it incorporates what Engell sees as a series of processes, beings, and relations that are contemplative and yet, most fundamentally,\u00a0active<\/em>. Giving central place to the \u2018originating Act of self affirmation\u2019, which has profound implications for Coleridge\u2019s religious views as well as for his philosophic thought, this essay considers Coleridge\u2019s metaphysics and his philosophy of religion as one.\u00a0Coleridge holds that the Act links philosophy and religion so that they are inseparable.\u00a0Moreover, his insistence on a series of related acts, on agency, as central to religious and philosophical thought has implications for his emphasis on the Will and the Trinity, as well as for his principle of the Logos<\/em> and what he calls the \u2018Dynamic Philosophy\u2019 and its \u2018polar logic\u2019.\u00a0 In this manner he may be seen as a modified Platonist, yet also something of a pragmatist, and a trinitarian Christian.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Part IV: Philosophy of Religion<\/strong><\/p>\n Coleridge tells us that religion passes beyond the ken, the horizon, of reason, with faith its continuation. Michael McGhee<\/strong> reflects on Coleridge\u2019s illuminating metaphor of twilight, night, and the starry heavens to see how the experiential forms it draws on can affect our understanding of terms like \u2018reason\u2019 and \u2018faith\u2019. Tentatively suppressing the face value acceptance of those terms, McGhee concentrates on the metaphor and the experience, to see where they lead without the leash of orthodox doctrine controlling the interpretation. Preserving \u2018the Soul steady and concentered in its Trance of inward Adoration\u2019 is the crucial experience. Twilight stealing into darkness and into night suggests progressing stillness, its associated concentration opening up a real prospect, the starry heavens, ordinarily concealed by the light of day and quotidian clamour. McGhee then reflects on Buddhist meditational traditions, where concentration or samadhi<\/em> is as a condition of awakening, seeing things as they are, and this is associated with \u2018compassion\u2019 or karuna<\/em>.<\/p>\n Noriko Naohara<\/strong> explores Coleridgean contemplation as \u2018an inward Beholding having a similar relation to the Intelligible or Spiritual, as sense has to the Material or Phenomenal\u2019. Though the development of his religious thinking involves much conflict between rationalism and faith, Coleridge retained Christian spirituality and this definition of Reason indicates his confidence about the human mind intuiting God as spiritual substance. His idea of language is similar to St Augustine\u2019s, and he thinks that human speech could denote the divine Word as Augustine shows in The Trinity<\/em>. He suggests that the generative process of human language is guided by the Will longing for redemption by Christ. Reason will return towards God supported by the aspiring Will that would move towards the divine Word, or Reason in its objective sense. His theology is that of waiting on God and it shows us a significant guide to faith in a post-Kantian era.<\/p>\n Suzanne Webster<\/strong> concentrates on Coleridge\u2019s theological reflections, especially those of his final years. She finds in Coleridge\u2019s notebooks and other key works, including the Theory of Life<\/em> and Aids to Reflection<\/em>, generally consistent results in his efforts to define, desynonymize, and establish the \u2018Order of the Mental Powers\u2019. By 1830, with regard to the human being on earth (or the earthly human \u2018Personal Identity\u2019), he had filled out his perception of the order of these powers in the context of what he called the \u2018triple Ichheit\u2019. Regarding Coleridge\u2019s thought about the origins of contemplative acts and their processes, Webster\u2019s essay explores the \u2018Order of the Mental Powers\u2019 as Coleridge saw them within the contexts of the triple Ichheit. She further explains how this ordering related to Coleridge\u2019s thoughts on God, the hypostases of the Trinity, and the relationships between Will, Reason, and Faith.<\/p>\n Gerald Janzen<\/strong>\u2019s essay, \u2018Notebook 55 as Contemplative Coda to Coleridge\u2019s Work and Life\u2019, is fittingly the final essay in the volume. This essay construes Coleridge\u2019s last Notebook (March\u2013April 1834, which he titled, \u2018Faith, Prayer, Meditation\u2019) as the coda to his work and life, on analogy with the concluding lines to Biographia Literaria<\/em> and to Opus Maximum<\/em> Fragment 2, lines likewise taken as codas to their respective works. Building on Mays\u2019 characterization of Coleridge\u2019s \u2018poetry of the affections\u2019, and on his identification of the arc of Coleridge\u2019s life as arising within the bosom of his father\u2019s so-called \u2018simple\u2019\u00a0faith, navigating \u2018strange seas of thought\u2019, and coming home at the end to his own (more complicated) simplicity, Janzen argues that one \u2018Clew\u2019 to Notebook 55 as coda to his work and life lies in the place the affections enjoy in Coleridge\u2019s notebooks of 1827\u201334, whose entries most deeply constitute exercises in contemplation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Congratulations to Peter Cheyne and his contributors on the forthcoming Coleridge and Contemplation collection, which Peter describes below.\u00a0 BARS helped to support a workshop that was part of the book’s… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1561"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1563,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561\/revisions\/1563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBook announcement: Peter Cheyne (ed.), Coleridge and Contemplation<\/em>, OUP, 2017<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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