Coleridge drew repeatedly on Plato's Socratic dialogues for figures of poetic inspiration, and on later Platonic works for metaphysical thoughts on the nature of Ideas. My analysis of Coleridge's philosophical writing has challenged Orsini's belief that 'it is precisely on Plato that Coleridge is least satisfactory'. Chapter 1 reviewed Coleridge's earlier comments on Plato, showing that, contrary to a common assumption, Coleridge did consider it important to distinguish Plato from Neoplatonism, even if he did not always succeed in doing so. This desire to reach 'the Source' reflected a new tendency among contemporary commentators; but Coleridge was distinctive in his intuitive sympathy with Plato, his sense that he had read Plato 'by anticipation'. In Chapter 2, I considered how Coleridge links Plato with Kant. Coleridge has often been attacked for his distortion of the Kantian thought he mediated. I suggested, however, that this was due partly to unfavourable conditions in England at that time, and partly to the continuing dispute among the post-Kantians — who often invoked Plato in their arguments — about the fundamental principles of the Critical philosophy. Coleridge in particular sought to Platonize Kant's account of Ideas. Whereas Kant held them to have regulative status only, for Coleridge's Plato they are constitutive, living powers that actively inform the mind. This disagreement has a considerable implication for the writing of philosophy. Kant attacked those writers as lazy and unphilosophical who, following Plato, poetically evoked a direct intuition of the ideal realm. The double-minded Coleridge was divided between the prosaic rigour of Kant and the 'visionary flights' of Plato; but I pointed out in Chapter 3 that this ambivalence also appears in Plato's dialogues themselves. I discussed echoes of the Republic's 'ancient quarrel' between poetry and philosophy in Coleridge, notably his unease about the passivity of mimetic art. A long tradition, however, had looked to Plato's Demiurge as embodying a 'higher' model of mimesis, imitating not the phenomenal world but the Ideas; and Coleridge often conceives of poetic creativity in these terms. Further, I argued that the ambivalence of Coleridge's attitude to poetic inspiration — as divine, yet passive and requiring rational scrutiny — is strongly reminiscent of Plato.
Important for much of the foregoing argument is the fact (now widely acknowledged among critics) that Coleridge invariably wrote — or talked —with an audience in mind. Platonic Coleridge does not present propositions to be accepted or refuted, but aims to provoke a change in the reader's consciousness. He regards the 'reading public', however, as unprepared for a discourse of Ideas. The importance of the distinction which, following Tennemann, Coleridge draws between Plato's esoteric and exoteric doctrines lies in the fact that this reflects Coleridge's own practice. In Chapter 4, I compared the public Lectures On the History of Philosophy with the marginalia to Tennemann: the latter, written for the eyes of J. H. Green only, explores certain esoteric topics only glanced at in the lectures. Superficially, the esoteric—exoteric distinction manifests itself as another version of the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. That is, Coleridge appears to follow Tennemann's suggestion that although the Platonic dialogues are artistically perfect, they are no more than preparatory to the true 'system' that remained unwritten. Coleridge accordingly speculated on the possibility of reconstructing the esoteric 'system' by sifting the reports of Plato's students. Yet at the end of Lecture Four he hints that it is not so much through technical reconstructions as through imaginative art, after all, that the Platonic esoteric is to be glimpsed. The esoteric, instead of a systematic network of propositions, designates an ascent to the active contemplation of Ideas, stimulated and expressed by the sublime in music, painting, and poetry. I pursued this suggestion further in Chapter 5, which began from the anxiety of reception implicit in the maintenance of an esoteric doctrine. I contrasted the Essays on Method in the 1818 Friend with the Opus Maximum — the former a published, exoteric work, the latter unpublished, esoteric. In The Friend Coleridge invokes Plato's authority to truncate the investigation into the Ground of philosophical method as unsuitable for the reading public. In the Opus Maximum, free from this anxiety of reception (as in the Tennemann marginalia), Coleridge at last dispenses with such evasions, and freely investigates the supposed territory of Plato's esoterica, beginning from the Idea of Will, encompassing the origin of evil, and attempting an a priori exposition of the Trinity. The Opus Maximum attains greater continuity than a more self-consciously 'literary' work such as The Friend; but it too falls short of a complete 'system'. Once again, Coleridge turns at crucial points to a poetic discourse of the sublime, represented by Milton.
I hope that the three key concepts used in this book — the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy; the esoteric—exoteric distinction; and the anxiety of reception — have implied some anticipations of the directions further studies of Coleridge's philosophical writing might take. First, rather than deplore Coleridge's vacillation between the vocations of poet and philosopher, it would be worthwhile to investigate further the part his thought has played in mediating and complicating the distinction between literary and philosophical writing — a distinction whose ultimate source in western thought, I have suggested, lies in Plato. Second, given the conceptual reticence of Coleridge's published work, the recipients of his 'esoterica' deserve more attention, especially J. H. Green, J. C. Hare, and John Sterling. The recent publication of the Opus Maximum and the fifth Notebook enables greater insight than has ever before been possible into what the Highgate circle heard from 'the good old man, | Most eloquent, who spake of things divine' (Arthur Hallam). The newly arisen material revitalizes the private voice of Coleridge, and suggests the extent to which the older no less than the younger Coleridge attempted to influence 'the whole' lives of those he instructed: a very Platonic, or rather Socratic, ambition.1 Coleridge, without being a noteworthy textual scholar of Plato, bequeathed a living interest in Plato and Platonism to a significant minority of the younger generation, through his discourses which (thought de' Prati) 'cannot be better compared than with the dialogues of Plato'.
1. For an aspect of Coleridge's pedagogy, see James Vigus, 'Teach-Yourself Guides to the Literary Life, 1817—25: Coleridge, De Quincey, and Lamb', The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 140 (October 2007), 152—66.