Platonic Coleridge

The story of Coleridge's reception of Plato which I have told in Chapter I would be only half complete without a parallel consideration of his reception of Kant, since the two were in Coleridge's mind inseparable. If the Greek writer 'dazzled' Coleridge with his imagery and philosophical mythology, the German (he relates) 'took possession of me as with a giant's hand' owing to his rigour of thought, his 'adamantine chain' of logic.¹ And given Coleridge's view of the shape of philosophical history, it was natural for him to associate these two foundational figures with each other, notwithstanding the distance in time and temperament between them. In contrast and partly in reaction to Priestley's assertion of the onward march of enlightened thought, Coleridge came to approach the history of philosophy as circular rather than linear, such that the positions adopted by ancient and modern philosophers could be essentially the same. The following scheme, scribbled in the margin of Proclus, though surely not intended as fixed dogma, is nevertheless representative in showing how he saw the twofold genesis of idealist philosophy:

I will explore this circular model in Chapter 4; here I simply want to note how it enabled Coleridge to read Plato through Kant, and vice versa. In the Notebooks, references to Plato and Kant tend to cluster together. Initial traces of Kantian thought can be seen in the philosophical letters to Josiah Wedgewood in 1801, in which Coleridge interprets Plato's Ideas as the 'original Faculties & Tendencies of the mind, the internal Organs, as it were, and Laws of human Thinking', suggesting that the translation should be 'Moulds' rather than 'Forms'.³ This terminology sounds reminiscent of Kant's 'categories', and as Orsini points out, the association stuck: Coleridge uses the word 'Moulds' for Kant's categories several times in the future.4

In the present chapter I explore Coleridge's mediation of the Kantian Critical Philosophy, and his Platonic transformation of it based on post-Kantian debates. I begin from the unfavourable conditions that any attempt to champion Kant encountered in England in the early nineteenth century: this context illuminates Coleridge's eccentric method of conveying Kantian thought, which I address in the second section. In the third section I consider Coleridge's interpretations of Kant, with particular reference to the doctrine of Ideas: Coleridge saw Kant and Plato as substantially aligned, but as differing on the 'highest problem' of philosophy, i.e. whether the Ideas are regulative or constitutive. In the fourth section I compare the German Romantic turn to Plato, by way of showing Coleridge's eclectic approach involved taking up available possibilities rather than lapsing (as is sometimes suggested) into an anachronistic philosophy of faith. Finally, the debate regarding regulative or constitutive Ideas impacts directly on the question of what kind of language is appropriate to philosophical writing; I thus conclude with Kant's criticism of Plato's mystical language, and the difficult but fruitful dilemma with which this presented Coleridge.

'The Most Unintelligible Emanuel Kant'

The reception of Kant in England during Coleridge's lifetime occurred in two phases, neither of which conduced to balanced comprehension of his philosophy. There was considerable interest among political radicals in the 1790s, especially from 1795 to 1798; but thereafter few (except Henry Crabb Robinson and Coleridge) had anything to say in Kant's favour, until De Quincey's brief articles in the 1820s. In Leask's words, 'Kantian philosophy appears to have made the leap from a marginal illuminism to a marginal absolutism without ever having come to rest in the centre'.⁵

Before his trip to Germany (September 1798—July 1799), Coleridge expresses curiosity about 'Kant, the great german Metaphysician', while referring conventionally enough to 'the most unintelligible Emanuel Kant.⁶ He might have derived the latter opinion from periodical articles on Kant, of which the first known may be cited as typical: the reviewer (Benjamin Sowden) offers a fair summary of Kant given the limits of a brief article, but concludes that Kant's system is 'a mass of obscurity and confusion, which instead of assisting the mind in the acquisition of true Science, tends to sink it in doubt and scepticism'.⁷ The association of Kant (and to a large extent all things German) with obscurity, scepticism, atheism, and hence revolution, was the keynote of his early reception in England. Those writers who did attempt a sympathetic mediation of Kant were exclusively radicals, often writing for periodicals run by the dissenting publisher Joseph Johnson: The Analytical Review and afterwards the Monthly Magazine.

This radical interest helps to account for Coleridge's pre-Göttingen curiosity. It may even be that Coleridge mentioned the unintelligibility of Kant by way of teasing his correspondent, the revolutionary Thelwall, who was a member of Friedrich Nitsch's Kantian Society in London.8 Nitsch, like the Irish radical J. A. O'Keefe, derived his synopses of Kant largely from the Popularphilosoph Reinhold, who, though no radical himself, did emphasize the political potential of Kant's programme for humanity.⁹ Kant's call in 'Beantwortung der Frage "Was ist Aufklärung?"' [An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'] to both individual and collective cultivation of reason, rather than blind faith, was a central text in this movement. Thomas Beddoes, another early influence on Coleridge, favourably reviewed Kant's 'Zum ewigen Frieden' [Towards Eternal Peace], quoting Kant's concluding maxim, All maxims that require publicity, in order not to fail of their end, coincide at once with policy and justice':¹⁰ a message that could have attracted the Coleridge of the 1795 Lectures. When two new books on Kant appeared shortly afterwards,¹¹ it might have seemed that Kant's cause was strengthening; but these works fell dead-born from the press.

This was because the political climate had turned quickly and decisively against the radicals. Johnson, the enabler of much of the Kantian literature, was imprisoned for sedition in 1798.¹² Between 1798 and 1799, nineteen translations of Kant's writings, mostly on religion, philosophy of history, and political philosophy, were published — nominally in London (as Essays and Treatises). But they were printed in Saxony, and owing to the war, few copies could reach England: so after a single review, the translator, John Richardson, was forgotten.¹³ Coleridge is unlikely to have been aware of this, but he was distinctly aware of the bitter campaign by the government-sponsored Anti-Jacobin Review (founded July 1798) against all radical intellectual activity. One source in particular, whom Micheli identifies as probably James Walker, then resident in Weimar, pilloried German universities as ludicrous, dangerous, and atheistic. Thus it was reported that the students at Jena are 'almost to a man, republicans [. . .] all formed into secret clubs', the 'scenes of perpetual [. . .] riots'. They are abetted by atheistic professors, at the head of whom, 'pre-eminent in infamy, stands Furchte [sic!], professor of philosophy, or, rather of philosophism'.¹⁴ Some such opinion of Fichte's Jena was admittedly expressed by certain German writers too; but the effect of these reports in England, where readers could not differentiate Kant from Fichte or Herder, was to reinforce blanket prejudice.

Defending traditional English universities against their German counterparts, Walker writes that the English students he had met at Göttingen had all converted to the new metaphysics and had consequently 'lost every sense of delicacy, every notion of morality and religion, and every emotion of patriotism'.¹⁵ He rounds on the paradigmatically unpatriotic Wordsworth and Coleridge: having failed to set up a libertine commune elsewhere, he claims, they naturally turned to Germany. This was one of Coleridge's early experiences of trial by review:

Such sneering was effective in driving English interest in Kant underground for some time, and thus began the second phase of the English reception of Kant: virtual ignorance with the exceptions of Coleridge and Crabb Robinson,17 The Monthly Register, in which Robinson published the first three of his outstanding introductory articles on Kant, had a limited circulation and all too brief a life span. The English Review and Analytical Review first amalgamated, then dissolved; the Critical Review, Monthly Review, and Monthly Mirror diminished their attention to German literature. Only the Monthly Magazine remained both unwaveringly radical and successful, yet increasingly concentrated on politics to the exclusion of literature.¹⁸ General disfavour or indifference toward German culture around this time is reflected by the collapse after just a year and a half (in June 1801) of a periodical designed for its diffusion, The German Museum.¹⁹

Meanwhile, it appears that during his year in Germany, Coleridge felt the excitement of Kantianism without yet studying its source.²⁰ He reports that the elderly poet Klopstock believes Kant an 'unintelligible jargonist' whose fame would soon wane, and yet Coleridge is puzzled by this prediction, for 'all are Kantians whom I have met with'.²¹ His letters mention having brought back a box of metaphysical books on his return to England.²² Moreover, annotating Kant's Logik many years later, he recollects having once owned a precursor to that volume:

This underground activity testifies both to the liveliness of the German milieu and to Coleridge's interest in it. His serious study of Kant probably began a couple of years later, the feverish urgency of which is evident in the famous letter to Poole proclaiming that he has 'completely extricated the notions of time and space' and referring grandly to 'my predecessors from Aristotle to Kant'.²⁴

Making Kant Intelligible: The Problem of Language

Writing in 1823, De Quincey opined rather grudgingly that Coleridge had been the only capable anglophone mediator of Kant's philosophy to date. Yet Coleridge, despite declaring, 'To me it will be happiness and honor enough, should I succeed in rendering [Kant's] system [. . .] intelligible to my countrymen',²⁵ undertook the task of 'explaining metaphysics to the nation' in what readers felt to be a puzzlingly eccentric manner: as Byron chuckled, 'I wish he would explain his explanation'.²⁶ De Quincey followed contemporary reviewers of the Biographia in lamenting Coleridge's 'Delphic obscurity',²⁷ and this complaint has been echoed ever since: one recent writer regrets his attempt to infuse Kantian philosophy into literary criticism, since '[a]s the technical chapters of Coleridge's Biographia demonstrate only too fully, arcane vocabulary and technical obscurity seem the necessary tools — and mysteries — of such an expert'.²⁸ What the earlier complainants could not know, however, was that Coleridge did in fact deal with Kantian matter in a straightforward and relatively systematic way, in his manuscript Logic.²⁹ There is a palpable difference in Coleridge's manner when writing for the 'reading public' from those manuscripts of which Sara Coleridge observed, with an insider's knowledge, 'the fear of the press is not in them'.30

I have dwelt on the unfavourable context for Kantian thought in England, because this, though it does not explain Coleridge's explanation, does help to explain why it took the complex form it did. Rosemary Ashton surmises that in his published writing Coleridge sometimes omits to mention debts to German writers in general and Kant in particular because the popular assumption was that they were obscure, morally dangerous, or both.³¹ As Coleridge wrote as late as 1820, 'our most sensible men look at the German Muses thro' a film of prejudice & utter misconception'.³² This observation helps us to see that a number of Coleridge's Kantian references in the Biographia were pertinent to their time.

First, Coleridge's reference to the activity of 'Reviewers and Frenchmen' in obfuscating the 'clearness and evidence' of Kant's philosophy almost certainly has in mind specific targets: Robert Morrison identifies the reviewer as Thomas Brown and the Frenchman as Charles de Villers.³³ I suspect Coleridge also alludes to Madame de Staël, whose De l'Allemagne enjoyed great success in England in Francis Hodgson's translation of 1813. Staël's influential presentation of Kant owes something to what she learned from Crabb Robinson's private lectures in Weimar in 1804,³⁴ and Coleridge might well have approved of its polemical slant against Anglo-French empiricism; but he would surely have considered that Staël made too many concessions to popular readability. Previous to De l'Allemagne, however, the 'chief source of popular knowledge on Kant' (according to Wellek) was indeed Brown's long review of Villers' Philosophie de Kant (Metz, 1801). Brown admits to not having read Kant at first hand, and Villers's popular-level exposition anyway errs fundamentally in reading Kant in psychological as opposed to logical terms — assuming, that is, that Kant is discussing particular cognitions, rather than the conditions for the possibility of cognitions.³⁵ So Brown's devastating review is directed against a phantom-Kant. He attacks Kant's 'cumbrous superfluity of nomenclature', dismisses his system as 'incoherent and feeble', and ridicules Villers's own obscurity and evasion.³⁶ It has recently been argued that, in alluding to Brown, Coleridge was obscuring the true, viz. 1790s radical, reception history of Kant, in the service of the conservative rewriting of his own past allegiances. It is further suggested that Biographia's alignment of Kant with English writers of the seventeenth century (and by extension with Plato) tactically pushes Kant into a transhistorical, non revolutionary realm.³⁷ Undeniable though this trajectory of Coleridge's thought may be, however, Brown's prominence was such that rebutting his review can hardly be considered a deflection.

Secondly, and a further point of defence for Coleridge's political acumen, he is accurately sensitive to the political conditions in which Kant operated. Tacitly comparing his own experience of a hostile political environment, Coleridge writes of Kant's 'imminent danger of persecution' in Prussia, which probably led Kant to dissemble some of his more Fichtean conclusions. Although Wellek feels that Coleridge exaggerates this danger of persecution, it is true that Kant feared it, and even submitted to censorship. By 1786 'Kant was gaining a reputation [. . .] as an atheist. He himself was reported to have feared that he could lose his position. Indeed, his Critique of Pure Reason was becoming notorious'.38 Friedrich Wilhelm II, whose government Coleridge aptly describes as 'that strange compound of lawless debauchery, and priest-ridden superstition', initially favoured Kant, but soon found him inimical to his crusade for piety, threatening him with 'unpleasant measures' following the publication of Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1793).³⁹ The elderly Kant submitted, and promised to stop discoursing on religion altogether; with Wilhelm's death in 1797 he was again free to publish, yet as Coleridge mentions, Fichte was expelled from Jena on a charge of atheism (1798). Coleridge reasonably concludes that 'the venerable old man's caution was not groundless'.⁴⁰ One recent endorsement of this argument of Coleridge's appears in Frederick Beiser's suggestion that Kant introduces religious doctrines at a point in the first Critique where they seemed to do least 'harm', in order to pre-empt censorship and allow Kant to make the more pressing argument for freedom of speech; Beiser refers to this as Kant's 'compromise with the status quo'.⁴¹ Coleridge's detection of a thoroughgoing esoteric method in Kant is therefore not quite as eccentric as it appears at first sight — but more on this below.

A third pertinent point in Biographia regards Kant's concept of the a priori, which Coleridge says has 'an absurdity burthened on it'.⁴² This was certainly the case, considering the account of Kant given by one apparently respectable source, William Drummond's Academical Questions. Travestying Kant as the peddler of the old doctrine of 'innate ideas' which Locke had long since exploded, Drummond sums up:

Again: 'Anticipation, then, is the basis of the philosophy which is called, and which is not, new'.⁴³ Coleridge was making an important correction to this prevalent misreading when he explained:⁴⁴

Coleridge continues with a favourite illustration: 'By experience only I know, that I have eyes; hut then my reason convinces me, that I must have had eyes in order to the experience'.⁴⁵ The a priori, for Kant and Coleridge, is that without which experience could not take place: it is logically presupposed by experience, not (as Drummond assumed) temporally prior to it. This was key to what Coleridge considered a great service performed by the Critique of Pure Reason (i.e. the first Critique): the subordination of Lockean empiricism. The first Critique elaborated the response of Leibniz to the empiricist assertion that there is nothing in the mind ('intellectus') that does not come through the senses. Leibniz replied, 'with the exception of the mind itself': and Coleridge was fond of quoting this response.⁴⁶ Kant's assertion of the active nature of mind decisively countered the empiricist teaching which Coleridge summed up as 'consciousness considered as a result' of mere mechanical processes.47

Orsini objects to the term 'pre-existed' in Coleridge's definition of the a priori, as making it 'almost' chronologically prior after all.⁴⁸ Coleridge clearly understood the importance of this distinction, but it seems that he wanted to use the temporal sense metaphorically, as a way of figuring the logical. I think an explanation for this may be found in another context: Coleridge's commentary on Wordsworth's 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality'. Coleridge praises the mysteriousness of this poem, which touches the 'depths' of the mind: the poem is intended for readers who are

Plato's doctrine of anamnesis, Coleridge implies, contains a deep psychological truth, which should admittedly not be reified into the doctrine of 'innate ideas' (Coleridge considered this doctrine a straw-man set up by Locke, and wished that Kant had been present at that time to elucidate the true a priori⁵⁰), but can be played with poetically in concepts of anticipation.⁵¹ The exceptionable Platonic term 'pre-existed', that is to say, embodies Coleridge's acknowledgement that language is tied to the corporeal world, and hence naturally obstructive in denoting the non-corporeal: given the inherent limitations of our cognitive apparatus, symbols of time and space are unavoidable in discourse about the non-spatial and non-temporal. The use of the metaphor 'deep' to describe a poem would itself be an example of this.

Coleridge's sense of the cardinal importance of establishing the true nature of space and time helps to explain his partiality, surprising from a modern perspective, for Kant's Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligiblis forma et principiis [On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World].⁵² He claims that this work 'contains all the main principles of the first Critique, 'and often more perspicuously expressed'. Coleridge ponders why the Latin dissertation had 'no sensible effect upon the Philosophic Public', whereas at the publication of the first Critique 'the universities of Germany exploded'; he recommends that 'the former work should always be studied and mastered previously to the study of the Critique d.r.V.& the works that followed it', it being a 'better auxiliary' than all the commentaries by Reinhold and others.⁵³ It is true that Coleridge's view of its merit was not eccentric, since Kant himself regarded it as marking the end of his 'precritical period' and the beginning of his 'critical philosophy': hence his request for the Dissertation's inclusion in the collection Vermischte Schriften (which Coleridge annotated).⁵⁴ Further, a major practical point in its favour for Coleridge when he began his Kantian studies would have been its Latin language. But above all the work was helpful to Coleridge in containing a clear statement on time and space, and with it an apparently strong Platonic dualism between the earthly world and the world of ideas: as Beiser notes, 'Kant makes a firm distinction between the sensible and the intellectual; and he thinks that it is possible for reason alone to give us insight into the noumenal realm'.55 In attempting to restore 'the noblest enterprise of antiquity' Kant refers specifically to Plato ⁵⁶

For it was of great significance for Coleridge that (in Lovejoy's words) 'Kant, not less than Plato, was a philosopher who believed in two worlds, or realms of being, corresponding to the two "faculties" of knowledge, the Understanding and the Reason'.⁵⁷ As we will see below, Coleridge came to use Plato's doctrine of Ideas in an attempt to overcome precisely that dualism; here I only want to note that Coleridge's troubled physical and mental experience (recorded for instance in 'Dejection: An Ode') indeed often encouraged him to think in terms of the human being as determined in the physical world, but a free agent in the noumenal. And the problem of language in trying to span the two appears throughout these speculations: recurring to the quotation about 'symbols' in Wordsworth's Immortality Ode, we can note that for Coleridge, language is problematic in being tied to physical significations, yet capable of being raised up, when used symbolically, to engage the noumenal realm. Hence the fact that the problem of 'the communication of truth' impinges whenever Coleridge attempts to set Kantian thought in writing. In one Notebook entry, a Trinitarian meditation on time and space, these problems come into sharp focus. Coleridge begins demonstratively, asserting that although a thing cannot be one and three at the same time, God is not in time, and therefore can be conceived without logical contradiction as a Trinity. He dismisses the notion of space as 'a receptaculum reale inane' (similar to Kant's phrase in the Dissertation, 'absolutum et immensum rerum possibilium receptaculum' [boundless receptacle of possible things]).⁵⁸ However, since our cognition takes place exclusively within the pure forms of perception, i.e. space and time, we cannot speak about God who transcends these categories. Thus lost for words, as it were, Coleridge exclaims exasperatedly against verbal demonstrations:

Giving up on the attempted demonstration of the Trinity, Coleridge hangs on to the problem of 'the medium of words':

Coleridge, like Kant in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, sees Idols and Ideas as a kind of polarity: Idols belong to the physical world (as Bacon revealed), Ideas to the noumenal world (as Plato expounded).⁶¹ That cry in mid-argument —'But we are too social!' — perhaps reflects the fact that Kant himself is in many respects so little a social philosopher.⁶²

Coleridge's language associates the rise of commerce with the decline of metaphysics; he was to complain similarly in Logic that there are 'terms which we are obliged to use in philosophic disquisition, and which yet we cannot use without awakening the meanings engrafted on them by the market'.⁶⁵ A system of paper promises —textbooks, paraphrases — might give the consumer of philosophy the pleasant illusion of knowledge, but the consumer might answer like Hamlet: What do you read? Words, words, words. Not only does Coleridge fear that, while promising gold, he may deliver paper, but also that he will then impose the same upon himself. It is easy enough to live on intellectual credit, and talk ' like a man of sense', but this results in inner impoverishment.⁶⁶

Kant, for all the political discomfort he faced, enjoyed an advantage in Coleridge's eyes: like the English Platonists of the seventeenth century, he was able to write learnedly for the learned, free from the necessity of submitting his work to that abstract monstrosity, a 'philosophic public'. That Coleridge was all too keenly aware that the conditions in which Kant's critical philosophy flourished in Germany were absent in England is evident from this marginale to Kant's Logic: 'the old Logicians, Philologists and Philosophers' were much more happily placed than their modern counterparts,

The fear of paper promises in philosophical writing leads Coleridge to indirectness and an inclination to the esoteric in his mediation of Kant.

Platonizing the First Critique: Constitutive Ideas

Coleridge acknowledged the decisive importance of this 'Copernican Revolution', noting that the otherwise comparable work of the Cambridge Platonists suffers from the lack of such a propaedeutic.⁶⁹ Yet he rejects the boundaries Kant actually set: for being steeped in Plato's dialectic and in post-Kantian idealism, he could not rest content with what he aptly referred to as Kant's 'modest humility with regard to the powers of the intellect'.⁷⁰ I want now to draw together five interrelated criticisms that Coleridge makes of the first Critique, suggesting that Coleridge turns to Plato's doctrine of Ideas for the criticism (number 'V' in my list) that leads and sums up all the others.

(i) Kant posits the existence of a noumenal 'Ding-an-sich' [thing-in-itself] beyond all perceptual phenomena, but insists that this is unknowable.⁷¹ Coleridge, however, suggests that Kant meant more by the Ding-an-sich 'than his mere words express' — an example of his refusing to take paper promises when he believed gold and silver were to be had.⁷² To attribute an esoteric method to Kant appears capricious, but it was not a Coleridgean aberration. It was Schelling who wrote: 'Ich glaube aber, daβ das, was Kant von Dingen an sich sagt, sich schlechterdings nicht anders, denn nur aus seinem durchgängig beobachteten Herablassungssystem erklären lässt' [I believe, however, that what Kant Says about things in themselves cannot be otherwise explained than by his consistently observed system of condescension].⁷³ And Coleridge suggests much the same, seeing in the obscurer parts of the first Critique 'hints and insinuations referring to ideas, which Kant either did not think it prudent to avow' (a reference to the fear of political oppression, discussed above), 'or which he considered as consistently left behind in a pure analysis, not of human nature in toto, but of the speculative intellect alone'.⁷⁴ The Schellingian-Coleridgean notion of a 'general system of condescension' in Kant is mere 'foppery' according to De Quincey, and in Wellek's view nothing short of 'monstrous';⁷⁵ but I shall suggest below that it has more foundation than that stern critic allows. Certainly Coleridge, who viewed esoteric doctrines as normal and necessary, intended no detraction from Kant in this respect. In Logic, Coleridge admits the existence of things-in-themselves, and agrees with Kant that logic cannot reach them — that is, they are not objects of the Understanding. The hint Coleridge would take from Kant is to conflate them with the Platonic Ideas, and make them the objects of intellectual intuition.⁷⁶

(ii) To claim that there exist things-in-themselves but that they are unknowable is to claim that our intuitions (Kant's 'Anschauungen', a word for which Coleridge repeatedly tried to construct an English equivalent 77) are sensuous only — that we do not have intellectual intuitions. In keeping with his dissension from the doctrine of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself however, and again like Fichte and Schelling, Coleridge disagrees. He notes that since Kant takes the word 'intuition' to refer exclusively to 'that which can be represented in space and time', the Sage of Königsberg is quite consistent to deny the possibility of intellectual intuitions. Yet Coleridge himself'reverted' to the 'wider signification' of the word, 'authorized by our elder theologians and metaphysicians according to whom the term comprehends all truths known to us without a medium'.⁷⁸ This redefinition at once transgresses Kant's boundary of possible knowledge, and re-opens the Platonic tradition reaching back to dialogues such as Phaedrus, in which the pre-existent soul beholds nourishing and life-giving ideal forms. Coleridge states the same position in different terms when he defines Reason 'with Jacobi'

This is precisely the mystical knowledge of which Kant denied the possibility, although the mysterious status of his Ding-an-sich had left the way open to such Plato-conscious interpretations.

(iii) Kant demonstrates in the 'Transcendental Dialectic' that traditional metaphysical debates reach an impasse in the form of the 'paralogisms' and 'antinomies'. Logical analysis, that is, can equally prove and disprove, among others, the four cardinal propositions of metaphysics: the eternity of the world, the immortality of the soul, the freedom of the Will, and the existence of God. Coleridge, however, consistently with his exaltation of Reason as an organ of spiritual sense, interpreted the antinomies as pointing to a 'higher logic'. Coleridge believed that Kant's antinomies proved only that the logic of the Understanding cannot resolve these questions. The intellectual intuition of Reason, however, does provide the sought-after knowledge.⁸⁰

Coleridge effectively summarizes his dissent from Kant's caution about the bounds of human knowledge in questioning the correctness of the title, Critique of Pure Reason. This work, according to Coleridge, 'would have been open to fewer objections, had it been proposed by the author under the more appropriate name of "Transcendental Logic"', since the Critique consists mainly in a transcendental analysis of'logic itself (that is, the forms of the understanding and the rules grounded on the same)'.⁸¹ Coleridge thus suggests that the first Critique, despite containing the word 'Reason' in the title, in fact only treats the Understanding, whilst hinting at a subsequent discourse on Reason that Kant never wrote. Connecting this with Coleridge's detection of esoteric 'hints and insinuations' in Kant, it is possible to See how Coleridge might have regarded his own Logic as a faithful exposition of Kant's critique of Understanding, whilst the sequel, the esoteric Opus Maximum, corresponded to the true critique of pure Reason to which Kant declined to ascend.

Embarking on the transcendental deduction of the Categories of the Understanding, Kant rather abruptly announces the principle upon which everything else is now shown to depend: the act of self-consciousness, or the 'Ich denke' [I think].⁸⁵ Kant's expository term for this self-consciousness is 'transzcendentale Einheit der Apperception' [transcendental unity of apperception]. It is transcendental, because it is the a priori condition of all experience; a unity, because there is only one I, or centre of consciousness; a unity of apperception, since by apperception Kant means self-consciousness.⁸⁶ Apperception is an Actus' [act], which necessarily accompanies all representations of objects: I cannot perceive an object without simultaneously being conscious of myself.⁸⁷ Although Kant abstains from further speculation on this topic, as potentially leading back into the metaphysics he was trying to exclude, Fichte and Schelling pursued the notion of apperception as an act with relentless vigour: the 'Ich denke' inevitably evolved into the Absolute of Schelling, as expounded in Coleridge's Ten Theses in Biographia chapter ten. Coleridge makes the primal 'I AM' a 'spirit' (translating the word 'Geist' as Schelling used it in his early work), arguing further that this must be a Will:

This passage takes its cue from Kant, who at the outset of the 'Transcendental Dialectic' in the first Critique defines his concept of 'Idee' [Idea] against Plato, and explicitly aligns himself with Aristotle.⁹² Kant refers to Plato as 'der erhabene Philosoph' [the sublime philosopher], which cannot be an entirely ironic epithet, and to a certain extent expounds him sympathetically. He deprecates Brucker's literal-minded ridicule of the insistence in Plato's Republic that a prince must participate in the Ideas in order to govern well: instead, according to Kant, Plato has shown that '[e]ine Verfassung von der gröβten menschlichen Freyheit nach Gesetzen, welche machen, daβ jedes Freyheit mit der andern ihrer zusammen bestehen kann, [. . .] ist doch wenigstens eine nothwendige Idee' [a constitution providing for the greatest human freedom according to laws that permit the freedom of each to exist together with that of others [. . .] is at least a necessary idea].⁹³ Such an Idea should function as an archetype, which will never be fulfilled in reality, but can be used to bring legislation 'ever nearer' to the greatest possible perfection. One can see how Kant and Plato harmonized usefully for Coleridge's polemic against the 'mechanic philosophy', when Kant writes:

This is what Coleridge meant in the quotation with which I began this chapter, by saying that Kant (mistakenly, in Coleridge's view) identified Platonic dialectic with sophism. But how was it that whereas Kant himself considered Fichte, Schelling, and other idealists to be sophistically transgressing the proper boundaries of Reason, the members of the younger generation themselves claimed (at least in the 1790s) to be continuing Kant's work? How could Coleridge have considered this development necessary, while attributing the requisite hints to Kant: 'what since Kant is not in Kant in germ at least?'⁹⁸ To answer such questions requires a glance at the wider phenomenon of post-Kantianism, which in Hamilton's words 'was a philosophical battleground in which the master himself was subjected to the logic of the vicarious, or the various ways in which his successors spoke through him or in his Spirit'.⁹⁹

Coleridge among the Post-Kantians

Secondly, Wellek's classic account is influenced by the Hegelian narrative of teleological progress in German idealism from Kant to Hegel. When Wellek attacks Coleridge for slipping back into a pre-critical, seventeenth-century 'mere philosophy of faith',¹⁰² the implication is that he should have been marching forward in step with Hegel, and this is at least questionable. Thirdly, studies of Coleridge's intellectual background have often made a false separation between influence from German idealism and influence from Greek thought, the latter usually being taken together with 'native English' Cambridge Platonism. As an early historian of rationalism wrote:

It is clear from Hedley's sketch of the Christian Platonic inheritance of Schelling and Hegel that this is a false separation.¹⁰⁴ Moreover, the three points I have just outlined are illuminated by Beiser's recent work, German Idealism. Beiser challenges the Hegelian narrative which tends to present German idealism as progress towards recognition of the 'subjectivist' absolute ego, or infinite self as the foundational principle of philosophy.¹⁰⁵ According to Beiser, this interpretation has been fed by the confusion which has arisen through the double meaning of the term 'ideal': 'the ideal can be the mental in contrast to the physical, the spiritual rather than the material; or it can be the archetypical in contrast to the ectypical, the normative rather than the substantive'. Two readings of'idealism' are then possible, depending on which definition one adopts: 'Idealism in the former sense is the doctrine that all reality depends upon some self-conscious subject; idealism in the latter sense is the doctrine that everything is a manifestation of the ideal, an appearance of reason'. If the latter sense is admitted, it becomes possible to see German idealism as, contra the traditional Hegelian narrative, actually 'a story about the progressive de-subjectivization of the Kantian legacy, the growing recognition that the ideal realm consists not in personality and subjectivity but in the normative, the archetypal, and the intelligible'. On Beiser's reading '[t]he history of German idealism is therefore more the story about the progressive unfolding of neo-Platonism'.106 'Unfolding' is also a very appropriate word for what Coleridge thought he was doing with Kant's supposed esoterica. Before assuming that when Coleridge speaks of pre existence, constitutive Ideas, intellectual intuition, and so on, he is being somehow untrue to his separate Kantian influence, it is worth heeding Beiser's reminder that 'Platonism plays a central role in the worldview' of post-Kantian idealists who strove to harmonize this with their development of Kant. Hölderlin, Hegel, Novalis, Schelling, and Friedrich Schlegel all began their philosophical education by reading Plato (in Greek), especially the Pliaedo and Symposium. Beiser argues:

In this comment the reader of Coleridge can recognize the need for the key desynonymization: a Coleridgean rephrasing would be that this mysticism goes beyond the realm of Understanding, soaring into the realm of Reason. Coleridge's above-quoted definition of reason perfectly accords with the tendency Beiser is describing: reason is 'an organ bearing the same relation to spiritual objects, the Universal, the Eternal, and the Necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phenomena'.¹⁰⁸

Imagination in free play produces what Kant refers to as 'ideas', embodied in beautiful works of art.

However, in a highly difficult and controversial passage, Kant then resists the possible inference that beauty in art can schematize morality, i.e. provide a sensible representation adequate to a moral idea: instead, he argues, it can only symbolize morality, i.e. provide a representation with no direct relationship to the moral, which functions by a process of mere analogy.¹¹² 'Yet', argues Kneller, 'it is difficult to see why Kant insists on the complete inability of imagination in free play to portray moral Ideas, given what he has already said about its creative power in reflective judgment'.¹¹³ This uncertainty was the stimulus to a series of later attempts to achieve a delicate and perhaps impossible balance: on the one hand, to maintain the autonomy of the aesthetic precisely as Kant had outlined; and on the other, to relate imaginative art more closely to moral principles, or (adapting Kneller's phrase) to discern moral Ideas in the play of imagination. Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education was the pioneering work in this respect, and it is entirely logical that so many parallels with Schiller's programme should be found in Coleridge, for instance in the Biographia's account of the indirect moral instructiveness of Wordsworth's poetry.¹¹⁴ The religion of art proclaimed in Schelling's early works also stemmed partly from Kant's suggestive but truncated account of imagination; and Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism was, in turn, one of the main sources for the Biogmphia's famous definition of the 'primary IMAGINATION' as 'the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception', and the 'secondary' or artistic imagination as an 'echo' of the same.¹¹⁵ In all these endeavours, the 'new school' of philosophers looked both to Plato's doctrine of Ideas, and to Socrates' moral teachings; the translation of the dialogues of Plato undertaken by Schleiermacher in the early 1800s thus became central to the development of aesthetics in Germany.

Owing precisely to this post-Kantian ferment, with which Coleridge was as familiar as an Englishman of his day could possibly be, it is hard to pin down his direct response to the Critique of the Power of Judgment.116 When he claimed in 1811 'to have mastered the spirit of Kant's Critique of the Judgement',¹¹⁷ he was clearly once again alluding to the post-Kantian distinction between the letter and the spirit of Kant, thus licensing himself to exploit precisely the kind of undeveloped hints concerning imagination and symbolism that I have just noted. Further, in 1810 he told Crabb Robinson that he considered it 'the most astonishing of Kant's works' — an ambiguous remark that might not signify only praise.¹¹⁸ It is likely that the English poet and practical critic might have been not only enraptured by Kant's accounts of genius, and the sublime, but also unable to accept Kant's insistence that works of art can have no determinate cognitive content.

It is probably significant, then, that Coleridge's only extensive attempt to mediate Kantian aesthetics occurs in the context of the criticism of fine art rather than literature, in which the latter problem is considerably less pressing. Coleridge wrote the essay series Principles of Genial Criticism (1814) to accompany an exhibition of paintings by his friend Washington Allston.¹¹⁹ Coleridge lucidly introduces Kant's concept of the subjective universality of judgments of taste,¹²⁰ though without naming the German philosopher or employing that technical terminology, no doubt as a concession to the periodical-reading public. Further, he carefully distinguishes the beautiful from the good, clearly drawing again on Kant's account of aesthetic autonomy. However, when Coleridge sums up this distinction at the end, a characteristically post-Kantian transfer into Platonic discourse occurs. He begins relatively cautiously:

So far this approximately accords with Kant.¹²¹ However, having started from this subjective perspective on beauty, Coleridge suddenly invokes a constitutive Idea of an objective beauty, which actively calls to the human mind:

Coleridge's reference to 'the Greeks' is in fact, as Jackson notes, to a speculative etymology in Plato's Cratylus (416c—d). Now we might expect Coleridge to elaborate on the implications of this radical and no longer strictly Kantian statement about the nature of beauty. But instead he truncates the discussion with a quotation in Greek from Plotinus: specifically Ennead 1:6, which had impressed Coleridge in Thomas Taylor's translation many years before. This quotation asserts mystically that the soul 'speaks of the beautiful as if it were familiar with it, recognizes and welcomes and, so to speak, adapts itself to it'. Wellek may be right to note that this abrupt assertion of the interaction between beauty and the soul constitutes a desertion of Kant's intention;122 but Coleridge wishes in this way to hint that (Neo)platonism offers the key to unlock Kant's reticence. At the same time he acknowledges that poetic, as opposed to merely logical, language is required to respond to the outward-reaching nature of beauty — and Coleridge offers this insight only fleetingly, owing to his own convictions regarding an esoteric method: such topics were for private speculation rather than public pronouncement. This Platonic turn, however, remains highly suggestive. It helps to make further sense, I think, of Coleridge's notion of reading 'by anticipation', discussed in Chapter 1 — the process by which a text seems to call up powers previously concealed in the reader's mind, which one then recognizes to have been there all along.

In making such a turn, Coleridge has much in common with the early German Romantics; and his thought deserves to be treated alongside theirs. Stated briefly, in Cassirer's words, 'To poeticize philosophy and to philosophize poetry — such was the highest aim of all romantic thinkers'.¹²³ I have elsewhere sketched a comparison between Coleridge's concept of a 'philosophic poem' (what he wished Wordsworth to compose) and the notion of 'Transzendentalpoesie' articulated by Coleridge's exact contemporary and fellow Plato-lover, Friedrich Schlegel.¹²⁴ Here, however, I wish to concentrate on the tensions involved in such post-Kantian ideals of poetic philosophy, tensions which Coleridge experienced no less keenly than Schlegel and other Romantics.

The Conflict between Kant and Plato

I have indicated two complementary strategies by which Coleridge attempts to bring Plato and Kant together. Either he criticizes Kant's restrictions on our possible knowledge of the noumenal realm, aligning the German philosopher with Aristotle and invoking Plato in opposition; or he suggests that Kant was hinting at this Platonic knowledge all along. Coleridge will use one or the other of these strategies depending on the context of his own particular discussions. It is now necessary to return to problems of language, however, and to note that what is most interestingly registered in Coleridge's prose is the tension involved in attempting this harmonization at all. Can a prose style be achieved that would be both Platonist and Kantian?

For as I have already noted, Coleridge was sensitive to Kant's explicit opposition to the Platonic claim to knowledge of the noumenal realm; and Kant's quarrel with Plato turns repeatedly on the appropriate tone for philosophical discourse. Kant suggests that Plato adopts a sublime, soaring rhetoric because this is easier than the patient overcoming of logical problems. Kant's memorable metaphor may have the charioteer of the Phaedrus in mind:

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant similarly assesses Plato's inferences from geometry with a mixture of admiration and disapproval: the ancient geometers

Kant developed this criticism in an essay of 1796 which Coleridge found 'admirable',¹²⁷ 'Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie' [On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in philosophy]. The immediate occasion for this polemic was Johann Georg Schlosser's annotated translation of Plato's Seventh Letter, whose antidemocratic message was couched in a florid style; but Kant was also combating the larger revival of Platonic philosophizing in 1790s Germany.¹²⁸ Jacobi was probably a major target. ¹²⁹ Kant attacks the claim of such writers to ' intellektuelle Anschauung' [intellectual intuition].¹³⁰ They find this concept attractive, in his opinion, because the knowledge gained by painstaking ascent to the supersensible through concepts of the understanding is both inferior and harder than a direct vision would be. The philosopher of intuition simply flies above the Herculean labour of self-knowledge ('die herkulische Arbeit des Selbsterkenntnisses [. . .] überfliegend').131 This, however, constitutes the unacceptable vanity of a would-be aristocracy, unprepared to work for a living: hence the 'superior tone' of these writers. Kant presents a polarity between Plato, 'der Vater aller Schwärmerei' [the father of all excessive enthusiasm], and Aristotle, whose philosophy is 'dagegen Arbeit' [in contrast, work]. He wrote similarly in an interesting unpublished note that 'Der Ursprung aller philosophischen Schwärmerei liegt in Platons ursprünglichen gottlichen Anschauungen aller mögliche objecte' [the origin of all philosophical enthusiasm lies in Plato's original divine intuitions of all possible objects].¹³²

For Kant sees Plato (alongside Pythagoras) as the original culprit for the aristocratic negligence now perpetrated in his name, despite the fact that he had an honourable motivation: according to Kant, the fundamental question 'how are synthetic propositions a priori possible?' did occur to Plato, but he flew to the doctrine of anamnesis by way of premature answer.¹³³ Here as elsewhere Kant is fascinated by anamnesis: it is in a sense a laudable answer to the problem that 'eine Anschauung a priori muβten wir doch haben, wenn wir uns das Vermögen synthetischer Sätze a priori in der reinen Mathematik begreiflich machen wollten' [we must have had an intuition a priori, if we wished to make comprehensible to ourselves the capacity to have synthetic propositions a priori in pure mathematics]; but it results in the presumptuous claim of 'a pre-given ability to feel an object that can still be encountered only in pure reason'.¹³⁴ Therefore Kant attacks the 'new level of assent' involved, a level that would include the 'higher logic' of Coleridge. The 'Ahndung' [intimation] of the supersensible is the claim, in Kant's view, which threatens to ruin all philosophical discourse. (Likewise in Anthropology, Kant commonsensically dismisses all 'Ahndung' as a 'Hirngespenst' [phantasm].¹³⁵) Finally, Kant rounds on Plato for hinting at some kind of inner light, the nature of which he cannot explain. If it is inexplicable, comments Kant ironically, so much the better, since an esoteric atmosphere is essential to the philosophy of intimations. But this is not in fact philosophy at all: for '[i]m Grunde ist wohl alle Philosophic prosaisch; und ein Vorschlag, jetzt wiederum poetisch zu philosophieren, mögte wohl so aufgenommen werden, als der für den Kaufmann: seine Handelsbücher künftig nicht in Prose, sondern in Versen zu schreiben' [at bottom, all philosophy is indeed prosaic; and the suggestion that we should now start to philosophize poetically would be just as welcome as the suggestion that a businessman should in the future no longer write his account books in prose but rather in verse].¹³⁶

Coleridge's admiration of this essay must to some extent be in tension with, for instance, his 'aristocratic' reading of Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode' as speaking to the few capable of watching their inward natures and discovering metaphorical truth in Platonic anamnesis; or his sense that he had come to Plato through an 'ahndung, an inward omening' of something congenial to his nature.¹³⁷^. It would certainly be oversimplifying to say that the mature, socially conservative Coleridge naturally sided with an aristocratic, genteel, work-shy version of Plato and his modern progeny. With his 'pious, ever-labouring, subtle mind' (in Carlyle's description),¹³⁸ Coleridge loved Spinoza for his iron chain of logic, and longed to conclude his own arguments with a decisive 'Q.E.D.'. He carefully desynonymized 'enthusiasm' from 'fanaticism', and concurred with the substance (though questioning the vehemence) of Kant's critique of a visionary such as Swedenborg.139 One of his greatest fears was that of passing off paper promises for gold upon his own mind, using his linguistic facility to construct a poetic veil which conceals only a lack of substance; hence the lawyer-like precision in his definitions and desynonymies.

How, then, was Coleridge able to accommodate this tension? A number of explanations seem possible. First, he discovered Platonic 'hints and insinuations' in Kant, as discussed above. Second, he was (to recall Perry's epithet) double-minded. He wanted on the one hand to work and set all demonstrations on the level of geometrical proof; but on the other he wanted intellectual gold, and that was not guaranteed by Kant's explicit method. At some point there must be an ascent from common logic to higher logic, from prose to poetry, as it were. Third, there is the vital difference between his private and public writings, which in part corresponds to his perception of the distinction between Plato's esoteric and exoteric teaching. Wellek's insight, I think, needs to be stated in reverse: Coleridge 'has used Kant in an indistinct wishy-washy popularizing manner to conform with traditional philosophy without, it seems, having realized the contradiction between this colorless Kant and the Kant he knew and had studied in the solitude of his library'.¹⁴⁰ Without agreeing that the Kant of The Principles of Genial Criticism or the Biographia Literaria is 'colourless', one can see how the silence-formulae, textual ruptures, and esoteric gestures in those works (which a Kantian work-ethic would find unacceptable) reflect what Coleridge himself called the 'anxiety of authorship' — the anxiety, that is, of publication and consequent reception by an unfit, anonymous readership. Where I think Wellek errs is in supposing that Coleridge did not see the difference between the Kant he attempted to mediate publicly and the Kant he encountered in his study. His awareness of the difference can be felt in the contrast between the elevated prose and erratic structure of the Biographia, the patient exposition of the Logic, and the self-questioning of the Marginalia. For all their troublesome differences, the philosophies of Plato and Kant were united in Coleridge's mind in demanding inward change, rather than (or prior to) assent to impersonal propositions whose form is indifferent to and uninflected by the condition of the mind that is to apprehend them: therefore it is not surprising that his prose style should differ according to whether his audience is (i) the public; (ii) the small band of like-minded followers such as Green; or (iii) himself, alone.

A fourth reason for Coleridge's accommodation of this tension in his philosophical writing may be, however, that to ask whether philosophy should be prosaic (labour-intensive) or poetic (intuitive) is not necessarily only to be offered a choice between Kant and Plato. For the dilemma was already present within Plato's writings themselves, in the form of the Ancient Quarrel between poetry and philosophy, the determination that poetry is insufficiently rational to function as a mode of inquiry.

Notes to Chapter 2

1. BL I, 153.

2. CM IV, 157-58.

3. CL II, 682.

4. Orsini, p. 48.

5. Leask, p. 82.

6. CL I, 209, 284.

7. Monthly Review, 10 (April 1793), p. 526, quoted by Giuseppe Micheli, The Early Reception of Kant's Thought in England 1785—1805 (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993), p. 23 —henceforth: Micheli.

8. Kathleen M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge's Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1981), p. 10.

9. F. A. Nitsch, A General and Introductory View of Professor Kant's Principles Concerning Man, the World and the Deity (London: Downes, 1796; facsimile edition London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993); O'Keefe, An Essay on the Progress of the Human Understanding (London, 1795). See further Micheli, pp. 58—72, and Monika Class, 'DrJ. A. O'Keeffe: Irish Mediator of Kantian Philosophy — Life, Work and Legacy', Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 22 (2007), 206—14. On the importance of Reinhold as an interpreter of Kant, see the introduction to Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, ed. by Karl Ameriks, trans, by James Hebbeler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

10. Monthly Review, 20 (August 1796), 486—90 (p. 489).

11. J. Richardson, The Principles of Critical Philosophy (London: J. Johnson, 1797); A. F. M. Willich, Elements of the Critical Philosophy (London: Longman, 1798), which was annotated by J. H. Green, not by Coleridge as asserted by Rene Wellek (Immanuel Kant in England 1793—1838 (1931, reprinted with Micheli, Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993), p. 21 — henceforth: Wellek) and Elisabeth Winkelmann (Coleridge und die Kantische Philosophie: Erste Einwirkungen des deutschen Idealismus in England (Leipzig: Mayer & Miiller, 1933), p. 31 — henceforth: Winkelmann): see CM vi, 335.

12. Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 155—69. Braithwaite comments that 'Johnson's very public association with Coleridge at such a critical moment in 1798 can only have aggravated the bookseller's case' (p. 162).

13. See Micheli, p. 105; Wellek, pp. 16—19.

14. AntiJacobin Review, 4 (December 1799), p. xiii; quoted in Micheli, p. 87.

15. Antijacobin Review, 6 (May 1800), p. 574; quoted in Micheli, p. 92.

16. Antijacobin Review, 4 (December 1799), p. xiii; quoted in Micheli, p. 93.

17. Gregory Maertz, 'Reviewing Kant's Early Reception in Britain: The Leading Role of Henry Crabb Robinson', in Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age, ed. by Gregory Maertz (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 209—26.

18. Micheli, pp. 96—100.

19. German Museum, 1—3 (January 1800—June 1801).

20. For Coleridge in Gottingen, see Winkelmann, pp. 34—40; Maximiliaan van Woudenberg, 'Coleridge's Literary Studies at Gottingen in 1799: Reconsidering the Library Borrowings from the University of Gottingen', Coleridge Bulletin, 21 (Spring 2003), 66—80.

21. CL 1, 444.

22. CL 1, 519, 599.

23. CM hi, 256.

24. CL 11, 706—07, March 1801. On what Coleridge meant by extricating the notions of time and space, see A. O. Lovejoy, 'Coleridge and Kant's Two Worlds', in Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Braziller, 1955), pp. 254—76 (pp. 258—60).

25. BL 1, 163.

26. Don Juan, 'Dedication'.

27. De Quincey, 'On the English Notices of Kant', London Magazine, 8 (July 1823), 87—95, reprinted in De Quincey, Works, 111, 85—97 (p- 95).

28. Susan Manning, 'Literature and Philosophy', in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, iv: The Eighteenth Century, ed. by H. B. Nisbet and Claude Raws on (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 587—613 (p. 608).

29. Not that critical consensus has been reached on the Logics Kantian credentials: its exposition of Kant's Table of Categories has been described as 'slavish' (Wellek, p. 123), 'faithful' (Orsini, p. 115), 'radically revisionary' (James C. McKusick, Coleridge's Philosophy of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 120), and a 'summary and simplification' (Gregory, Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination, p. 94). Most recently, Richard Berkeley states that the work contains 'plagiarisms' of Kant (Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason, pp. 200, 202); but is plagiarism possible in an unpublished work? A balanced study of the Logic would be a good place for a full reassessment of Coleridge's Kant-reception to begin.

30. Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare and Some of the old Poets and Dramatists with Other Literary Remains of S. T. Coleridge, ed. by Mrs H. N. Coleridge, 2 vols (London: Pickering, 1849), p. viii.

31. Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 44.

32. CL v, 13.

33. Robert Morrison, "'Reviewers and Frenchmen" in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria', Notes and Queries, n.s. 42 (1995), 180—81.

34.James Vigus, 'Zwischen Kantianismus und Schellingianismus: Henry Crabb Robinsons Privatvorlesungen liber Philosophie fur Madame de Stael 1804 in Weimar', in Germaine de Stael und ihr erstes deutsches Publikum, ed. by OlafMiiller and Gerhard R. Kaiser (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), 357—93. Robinson's texts are printed in Henry Crabb Robinson: Essays> on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics, ed. by James Vigus (Leeds: Maney, forthcoming 2009).

35. Wellek, pp. 32-33-

36. Edinburgh Review, January 1803, 253—80, reprinted in Life and Collected Works of Thomas Brown, 8 vols (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 2003), 111, 258, 264, 275.

37. David M. Baulch, 'The "Perpetual Exercise of an Interminable Quest": The Biographia Literaria and the Kantian Revolution', Studies in Romanticism, 43.4 (Winter 2004), 557—81.

38. Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 318 — henceforth: Kuehn.

39. BLi, 154; Kuehn, pp. 339, 378-80.

40. BL 1, 155; Kuehn, p. 404.

41. Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 53. I explore this point further below.

42. BL 1, 293.

43. Drummond, Academical Questions (London, 1805), pp. 352, 364. Cf. Peacock: 'Scythrop's romantic dreams had indeed given him many pure anticipated cognitions of combinations of beauty and intelligence': Nightmare Abbey (London: Penguin, 1969; first published 1818), p. 50.

44. See Ashton (p. 41) and Wellek (p. 122) for favourable assessments of Coleridge on the a priori. Nitsch on the a priori is comparatively vague (General and Introductory View, p. 83). For Kant's definition, see Critique of Pure Reason, B2—3.

45. BL 1, 293; cf. Logic, p. 76, and p. 146 where the analogy of the eye recurs; cf. Friend, 1, 111.

46. CL 11, 685—86; BL 1, 141; LS, p. hi; Logic, p. 226; Phil. Lects. 11, 574—75.

47. BL 1, 117; Orsini, p. 66.

48. Orsini, p. 78.

49. BL 11, 147.

50. CL 11, 678—85; 'how much was done by Kant, in strictly appropriating the term, "a priori." Had this been fully elucidated, Locke would never have had the suffrage of [sensible eighteenth-century] men, like Petvin' (CM iv, 112); cf. Jackson's commentary in Phil. Lects. 1, 1-lii.

51. See Chapter 1, above. Coleridge again invokes Wordsworth's 'Ode' in the 'Essays on Method' in The Friend, as I discuss in Chapter 5. Some twentieth-century scholars have seen in Plato's anamnesis the first Western discovery of the a priori. If so, however, the difference remains that Kant's a priori is subjective, whereas Plato's is objective, the Ideas being absolutely objective realities which the mind grasps: see Giovanni Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy, 11: Plato and Aristotle, ed. and trans, by John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 122-23.

52. This question is raised by D. M. MacKinnon, 'Coleridge and Kant', in Coleridge's Variety, ed. by John Beer (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 183—203, but MacKinnon is not clear on the motivations for Coleridge's preference (p. 197).

53. CM hi, 318; cf. Logic, p. 243 and BL 1, 288—89.

54. See Kuehn, p. 190.

55. Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781—1801 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 37. Beiser actually detects a subtle anti-idealism in the Dissertation, but Coleridge presumably did not feel this. Coleridge distinguishes the phenomenal and noumenal worlds as early as 1805 (CN 11, 2666); cf. Friend, 1, 291.

56. Vermischte Schriften, 11, 452 (§9).

57. Lovejoy, 'Coleridge and Kant's Two Worlds', pp. 264—65; cf. Hedley, pp. 162—69, and Deirdre Coleman, Coleridge and 'The Friend', 1809—1810 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 137—38.

58. De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis, HID, in Vermischte Schriften, 11, 464.

59. CN hi, 3973-

60. CN hi, 3973.

61. See Friend, 1, 492; Phil. Lects. 11, 559. Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Konigsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius, 1798), §38.

62. Madame de Stael's De VAllemagne memorably promotes the reputation of Kant as a solitary engaged in sublime contemplations.

63. See Robert B. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 109—20. For Kant's third antinomy, Critique of Pure Reason, B472—79.

64. CN hi, 3973.

65. Logic, p. 150.

66. Cf. CN hi, 3953. Vallins argues that truth, for Coleridge, consists in the tension between feelings and expression, noting that he often mistrusts expression per se (Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism, pp. 37—42).

67. CM hi, 257.

68. KrV B xxxi. A detailed account of Kant's self-identification with Socrates' moral midwifery is Heiner Bielefeldt, Symbolic Representation in Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 21-23.

69. What they all wanted was, a pre-inquisition into the mind, as part Organ, part Constituent of all Knowledge: an examination of the Scales, Weights and Measures themselves, abstracted from the Objects to be weighed or measured by them — in short, a transcendental Aesthetic, Logic, and Noetic. (CM v, 81; cf. CM 111, 918—19) This criticism was neglected by Claude Howard, Coleridge's Idealism. A Study of his Relationship to Kant and to the Cambridge Platonists (Boston: Badger, 1924), who misleadingly argued that the Cambridge Platonists 'anticipated all the essential points of Kant's idealism' (p. 98): a claim surprisingly revived in Christina Flores, Plastic Intellectual Breeze: The Contribution of Ralph Cudworth to S. T. Coleridge's Early Poetics of the Symbol (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008).

70. Phil. Lects. 11, 538.

71. Critique of Pure Reason, B45.

72. BL 1, 155 and n.

73. Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (1795), quoted in Wellek, p. 97.

74. BL 1, 153-54.

75. Wellek, p. 97.

76. Logic, p. 131; cf. CM hi, 249.

77. Logic, p. 151; for further examples, Orsini, p. 91.

78. BL 1, 289.

79. Friend, 1, 155—56; cf. 190—91, 490—95; Winkelmann, pp. 53—121; on Jacobi as an influence on Coleridgean Reason, see Thomas McFarland, 'Aspects of Coleridge's Distinction between Reason and Understanding', in Coleridge's Visionary Languages, ed. by Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), pp. 165—80; and on Neoplatonic-mystical discourse in the wake of Kant's Critiques, Dieter Henrich, 'The Allure of "Mysticism"', in Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, ed. by David S. Pacini (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 65—81.

80. In Chapter 4 I discuss Coleridge's use of the antinomies to interpret Plato's dialogues, and vice versa.

81. Logic, p. 204; cf. p. 213, where Coleridge defines transcendental logic as the 'analysis of the pure understanding'. Coleridge elsewhere suggested the first Critique should be entitled 'An inquisition respecting the constitution and limits of the Human Understanding' (CL v, 421). Jacobi argued similarly: see Friedrich HeinrichJacobis Werke, ed. by Friedrich Roth and Friedrich Koppen, 6 vols in 7 (Leipzig, 1812—25), vol. 111; and Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Reason the Understanding and Time (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1961), p. 12.

82. CM hi, 249.

83. Quoted in Winkelmann, p. 178.

84. Orsini, p. 128, citing CN 11, 2057.

85. Critique of Pure Reason, B137.

86. Critique of Pure Reason, B139—40; Orsini, p. 117. Kant substantially rewrote this section for the second edition.

87. Critique of Pure Reason, B137.

88. BL 1, 279—80. This is an admittedly drastic summary of the genesis of the Biographia's 'I AM'; for full detail, see Friedrich A. Uehlein, Die Manifestation des Selbstbewufitseins im konkreten 'Ich bin': Endliches und Unendliches Ich im Denken S. T. Coleridges (Hamburg: Meiner, 1982). Cf. also Breunig, Verstand und Einbildungskraft, pp. 188 ff.

89. See Chapter 5, below.

90. CN 1, 1717, 1711; Hedley (p. 183) contrasts his praise of the Platonists' psychology (CN 111, 3935)-

91. SM (Appendix E), pp. 113—14. Trans. 'In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men', a variation on John 1. 4. De Paolo helpfully reviews Coleridge's regulative/constitutive distinction (pp. 91—95). For a full unfolding of Coleridge's distinction between Platonists and Aristotelians, see e.g. CM v, 770—71, and David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought (London: Murray, 1974).

92. Critique of Pure Reason, B370.

93. Critique of Pure Reason, B372—73.

94. Critique of Pure Reason, B370—71.

95. CL v, 136-38.

96. Critique of Pure Reason, B375.

97. Critique of Pure Reason, B672.

98. Quoted in Winkelmann, p. 242.

99. Hamilton, Coleridge and German Philosophy, p. 4.

100. Wellek, pp. 67—68.

101. Hedley, p. 29; cf. Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1987), p. 43.

102. Wellek, p. 135.

103. John F. Hurst, History of Rationalism (London: Triibner, 1867), p. 368.

104. Hedley, pp. 31—32. On the pairing of Kant with Plato as a standard strategy of nineteenth-century Kantians, see Melissa Lane, Plato's Progeny (London: Duckworth, 2001), pp. 64—70, who also acknowledges the historical importance of Coleridge's interpretation (pp. 70—74).

105. Not of course that Hegel himself was a subjectivist, but If Hegel's absolute is interpreted as an infinite mind, and if one accepts that his system is the culmination of German idealism, then it seems as if the idea of the absolute or infinite subject must be the final purpose of German idealism itself. This simple but seductive view has had a deep impact upon the historiography of German idealism, if only because so much of its history has been written from a Hegelian standpoint. (Beiser, German Idealism, p. 9; cf. Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, p. 8) For defining 'idealism', cf. Hedley, pp. 23—24.

106. German Idealism, p. 6.

107. Beiser, German Idealism, p. 364; on the vital Platonic strand in Schelling, pp. 563—64.

108. Friend, 1, 155—56.

109- Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:175—76.

110. Critique of the Power of Judgment, §49, 5:314.

111. Jane Kneller, Kant and the Power of Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 52. In this paragraph I have relied on Kneller, pp. 45—53.

112. Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 59, 5:352.

113. Kneller, p. 54.

114. See Michael John Kooy, Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), who also points out that Coleridge, while extensively drawing on the Critique of the Power of Judgment, objected to its subjective bias (pp. 100—06).

115. BL 1, 304. I consider Coleridge's adaptation of Schelling's exploration of the ground common to man and nature in Chapters 3 and 5.

116. Ben Brice, Coleridge and Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 81—93, argues interestingly that Kant's 'anti-symbolic aesthetics reflected a sceptical 'agnosticism' that must have been troubling for Coleridge; but this begs the question of how Coleridge read Kant. On Coleridge's struggle to reconcile conflicting strands of post-Kantian thought, see Tim Milnes, 'Through the Looking-Glass: Coleridge and Post-Kantian Philosophy', in Comparative Literature, 51.4 (Autumn 1999), 309—23.

117. CL hi, 360.

118. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, Barrister-at-Law, F. S. A., ed. by Thomas Sadler, 2 vols (Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1870), 2nd edn, 1, 195 (1810).

119. He continued to feel proud of these essays for many years: TT1, 453, and SWF 1, 353.

120. Ross Wilson detects Coleridge's accordance with Kantian 'subjective universality': 'Coleridge's "German Absolutism" ', in Coleridge's Afterlives, ed. by James Vigus and Jane Wright (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 171—87.

121. SWF 1, 382—83. The editor identifies 5: 207 (§4) and 5: 236 (§17) as the relevant passages in Kant, though these are not exact correspondences.

122. Wellek, Kant in England, pp. 113—14. Nevertheless, a plausible comparison between Kant's Critique of Judgment and Plato's Symposium is made in Mihaela C. Fistioc, The Beautiful Shape of the Good: Platonic and Pythagorean Themes in Kant's 'Critique of the Power of Judgment' (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).

123. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, p. 156.

124. James Vigus, 'Transzendentalpoesie bei Friedrich Schlegel im Vergleich zum Begriff "Philosophic Poem" bei Coleridge', in Friedrich Schlegel und Friedrich Nietzsche: Transzendentalpoesie oder Dichtkunst mit Begriffen, ed. by Klaus Vieweg (Paderborn: Schoningh, 2008), pp. 137—47.

125. Critique of Pure Reason, B8—9.

126. Critique of the Power of Judgment, B273—74, §62.

127. CM hi, 357; cf. CL iv, 4945.

128. Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. by Peter Fenves (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 72—74. My translations of Kant's essay are based on Fenves. See further Heinz Heimsoeth, 'Plato in Kants Werdegang', in Studien zur Kants philosophischen Entwicklung, ed. by Heimsoeth and others (Hildesheim: Olms, 1967), pp. 124—43 (p- ^I3^)₅ which appropriately emphasizes Kant's ambivalent stance toward Plato.

129. Lovejoy, The Reason, pp. 7—15.

130. Vermischte Schriften, 111, 304.

131. Vermischte Schriften, 111, 306.

132. Handwritten note 6051, quoted in Bielefeldt, Symbolic Representation in Kant's Practical Philosophy.

133. Vermischte Schriften, 111, 307.

134. Vermischte Schriften, 111, 307.

135. Anthropologie, §35.

136. Vermischte Schriften, 111, 333.

137. CN hi, 3935, discussed in Chapter 1, above.

138. Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling, p. 62.

139. See the marginalia to 'Träume eines Geistersehers' (1766): CM111, 316—18, 333, 350—55; and H.J. Jackson, ' "Swedenborg's meaning is the truth": Coleridge, Tulk, and Swedenborg', in In Search of the Absolute: Essays on Swedenborg and Literature, ed. by Stephen McNeilly (London: Swedenborg Society, 2004), pp. 1—13, esp. p. 12.

140. Wellek, p. 69.nnn