A Disturbing Choice From Coleridge's Perspective

By Author: Carl
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Coleridge, of course, expressed contempt for the infidel Hume. Yet Brice makes the ingenious suggestion that 'Kantian aesthetics acted as a kind of "Trojan Horse" through which Coleridge was forced to confront Humean scepticism'. Brice sketches Kant's pietistic background (weaving in Coleridge's recognition of the Sage of Kbnigsberg's essential modesty), to account for the 'anti-symbolic' nature of his account of the sublime in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (p. 86). With this term Brice refers to Kant's insistence that natural objects cannot symbolise Ideas of Reason: the experience of the sublime consists precisely in the imagination's failure to achieve such symbolism, thus enabling us to recognise the (moral, non-sensuous) grandeur of Thomas Sabo Jewellery our own Reason. Hence Kant strongly approves the biblical prohibition against idolatrous images, just as Locke did before him. As Brice sums up, 'Kant confronts the Humean "fork" of anthropomorphism and agnosticism, and chooses the latter': a disturbing choice from Coleridge's perspective, and one barely softened by Kant's ...
... account of 'symbolic hypotyposis', which admits that natural beauty can form a limited kind of bridge to the supersensible. Brice's point is that according to Kant, hypotyposis involves the mind creating symbols, not discovering them in nature.

This interpretation of Kant is ably defended; but it is open to the objection that this was not how Coleridge himself read Kant. When Coleridge claims to have 'mastered the spirit' of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, he alludes to the distinction between the letter and spirit of Kant that had become standard in 1790s Germany. Coleridge referred likewise in chapter nine of the Biographia Literaria to Kant's 'hints and insinuations', refusing to take Kantian modesty at face value after all. And this was not groundless, for Kant does indeed hint at a potentially idealistic escape from Thomas Sabo Bracelets the prongs of Hume's fork: in the Prolegomena to Every Future System of Metaphysics, he explicitly espouses a 'symbolic anthropomorphism', which as commentators sometimes note, preserves some of the sense of divine mystery propagated by older, metaphysical analogy-theories. It was primarily Schelling who capitalised on Kant's equivocations to develop a monistic theory of symbolism which, though attractive to the ex-Unitarian Coleridge, did finally seem to the English writer dangerously pantheistic; pantheism being a controversial term that Brice tends to avoid, but whose relation to 'anthropomorphism' could do with untangling.

Brice himself briefly offers an important insight in this direction when he notes that at least around 1815,'Coleridge's admixture of faith and doubt in symbolic apprehension is a reflection of his irreconcilable loyalty to both Kant and Schelling at this point in his career': a fact that calls for elaboration in future research. The second half of Coleridge and Scepticism applies the foregoing theory in readings from two phases of Coleridge's career, 1795-1805 and 1815-1825. Brice moves deftly between notebook entries, poetry, and published prose, allowing Coleridge to speak fully for himself, before closing in to expose the doubts and contradictions he sees in most of these texts.