BULLETIN OF THE HEGEL SOCIETY OF GREAT BRITAIN

Hegel and British Idealism

Coleridge's "ideal Realism": an alternative to the "doctors of the Absolute"?

Mary Anne Perkins

A few months ago I read Peter Nicholson's The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists1
for the first time. In the index I found more than a hundred references to Hegel and only one
to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, as many of the tatter's writings, published for the first
time in recent years, become generally accessible there is an increasing sense that he has been
unfairly deprived of his due status as a philosopher. This is partly, no doubt, the syndrome of
the prophet in his own country and partly the inevitable consequence of much of his later work
remaining unpublished until recent years. Coleridge himself, with what some would take to be
confirmation of an over-sensitivity to criticism, felt the neglect of his work went deeper and
betrayed an anti-philosophical trait in British character.
Despite his close reading of the work of many of his German contemporaries it seems
that he did not read more than sixtyone pages of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik. His margin
notes to this work are, on the whole, negative in their criticism. However, despite significant
disagreements, there is much common ground in theme, argument and conclusion between his
many drafts of the 'Logosophia', his intended magnum opus, and Hegel's system.
The aim of this study is to develop and explore in greater detail one aspect of an earlier
more general theme;2 here it becomes a comparison of Coleridge's understanding and use of
the term 'Idea' with that of Hegel, and an analysis of Coleridge's own 'ideal Realism'. As I
began to address the issues involved the following questions presented themselves
immediately. What relevance does a discussion concerning the nature and function of ideas
have today? Does the term 'idea' still have any epistemological importance? Is it only
interesting in terms of an illustration of the flaws which long ago made idealism the object of
widespread philosophical suspicion? Is the term 'idea' in some way irrevocably associated with
a humanism which, since Nietzsche, appears to have been more or less successfully routed?
My response to these questions draws on the possibility that 'idea' is still, in
Coleridgean terminology, a 'living word'. Clearly, it is not merely a part of the discourse of
academics. Whatever linguistic philosophy, the jargon of'signifier1 and 'signified', the crises of
semiotics may do with it, it is a word which most English language speakers would claim to
understand; and one which they assume is generally clear to others too. This very
presupposition of communicability surrounding the term, even in the language of critical
theory, contributes to its continuing importance. Idealism in its diverse forms from Plato to
Hegel, has become increasingly philosophically unfashionable in the later twentieth century.
Paradoxically, the intense focus on ideas of both Hegel and Coleridge is (in either, I would
suggest) only very distantly related to 'idealism' as it is represented by late twentieth century

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writers. It is the distorted representation rather than the original which forms such an easy
target for deconstruction. Yet for Hegel, the Idea has a massive significance as the focus, the
telos, the dynamic and the form of his system. For Coleridge too the meaning of 'idea' is
crucial - not merely to the speculative intellect, but to every area of discourse whether
religious, moral, psychological, political or social.
Philosophy as the 'truth of ideas'
'Whether ideas are regulative only, according to Aristotle and Kant, or likewise constitutive,
and one with the power and life of nature, according to Plato and Plotinus' is, according to
Coleridge, 'the highest problem of philosophy, and not part of its nomenclature'.3 This is one
of many such statements that seem to express his anxiety that the clear focus on the critical
issue of ideas might be lost in a blurring of philosophical vision, and that, in turn, philosophy
itself would thereby be impoverished. He defines philosophy as 'the doctrine and discipline of
ideas'.4 One of his main aims was to have taught

as many as have in themselves the conditions of learning the true import and
legitimate use of the term, Idea, and directed the nobler and loftier minds of the
rising generation to the incalculable Value of Ideas (and therefore of
Philosophy which is but another name for the manifestation and application of
Ideas) in all departments of knowledge.5

His famous division of all mankind into two classes - Platonists and Aristotelians - was based
upon a difference in understanding of ideas. 'I believe Aristotle never could get to understand
what Plato meant by an Idea.... With Plato Ideas are constitutive in themselves'. In Plato, 'the
Understanding is distinctly contemplated and looked down upon from the Throne of Actual
Ideas or Living, Inborn, Essential Truths.' Aristotle, Coleridge admits, was a brilliant mind,
but 'he confounded Science with Philosophy which is an error. Philosophy is the middle state
between Science or Knowledge and Wisdom or Sophia'.6 What Aristotle and his followers
failed to understand is that 'The Reason is a Participation of Ideas: & strictly speaking, it is no
Faculty, but a Presence, an Identification of Being & Having17. Coleridge goes so far as to say
that the most significant error of 'Schelling, Solgar, Hegel, and the Germans since Fichte,
consists in deducing the whole Grammar of Philosophy and Religion from the Verb
Substantive Esse, alone: excluding (its coordinate) the auxiliary Verb, Habere'. In a typical
blend of theological and philosophical argument, he illustrates the point concerning Being and
Having by juxtaposing the beginning and the end of the Lord's Prayer: 'Our Father, that art -
thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory!'8. It is clear, then, that, for Coleridge, ideas
are not to be identified with a faculty of speculative intellect on the one hand, nor merely with
an ontology on the other. To stretch a point (and one which cannot be fully developed here),
we might see in his approach, a century before Heidegger, the basis for a counter-challenge to
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the latter's critique of the western preoccupation with ontology, and an anticipation of his
seinsfrage, his questioning of Being.
Coleridge defines ideas as 'knowledges immediate, yet real'. They are thus
'distinguished in kind from logical and mathematical truths, which express not realities, but
only the necessary forms of conceiving and perceiving, and are therefore named the formal or
abstract sciences.' In contrast, 'Ideas ... or the truths of philosophy, properly so called,
correspond to substantial beings, to objects whose actual subsistence is implied in their idea,
though only by the idea revealable19. Elsewhere he again asserts that 'an Idea...implies the
reality of that to which it corresponds as well as its own formal truth'.10
In these passages, it becomes clear that his Platonism is modified by many influences,
particularly that of Kant and the Kantian antinomies. For example, in Aids to Reflection
Coleridge identifies an Idea as the 'Indifference', the Mesothesis' or midpoint between the
thesis of the subjectively Real, and the antithesis of the objectively Real.11 But his theory of
ideas also provides a critique of Kant. The latter's fundamental error had been his failure to
establish that the derivation of Ideas involved not merely the 'Speculative Intellect' but
practical Reason. Kant may have intended to establish a basis of support for practical Reason
through his theory of Ideas, but this was not sufficient. 'An Idea...must unite in itself the
Speculative and the Practical'.12 The 'true and platonic theory of Ideas' recognized the moral
dimension of the origin of Ideas. Kant's failure in this respect led to the substitution of
'Reason with Reasoning, ideas with abstracta, nomina generalia, and other products of the
Understanding'.13 Kant had seen ideas as 'Oscillations' of the imagination, a chain of
constructions with which the mind might respond to certain stimulii, for example, in a
mathematical deduction. In contrast, according to 'the true Platonic view', Coleridge asserts,
'the Reason and Will are the Parents ... and the Idea itself the transdendent Analagon of the
Imagination or die spirituelle Anschauung - spiritual Intuition.' (ibid)
The loss of Ideas
Coleridge believed that philosophy had become impoverished and misdirected as a result of the
distortion, even the loss, of ideas. On the one hand the doctrines of empiricism falsely
identified ideas as images, objects of thought, perceptions; on the other, the 'doctors of the
Absolute' (for example, Oken, Schelling and Hegel) allowed ideas to be identified with
abstractions. Much of the trouble was caused by the misuse of language. Of 'idea' Coleridge
complains: 'the vague use of this word has been the cause of much error and more
confusion'.14 Ideas are 'the most real of all realities, and of all operative powers the most
actual'.13 Against the dictates of empiricism, he argues that an idea is 'an educt of the
Imagination actuated by the pure Reason, to which there neither is or can be an adequate
correspondent in the world of the senses - this and this alone is = AN IDEA'.16 Or again, 'an
"idea" is equidistant [...] from sensation, image, fact, and notion...the antithesis, not the
synonyme of eiScoXov'.17
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If an idea must not be confused with a 'sensuous image' neither should it be confused
with a conception - : 'Every Conception has its sole reality in its being referable to a Thing or
Class of Things, of which or of the common characters of which it is a reflection'. In contrast,
'an Idea is a POWER (8uvamg voepa) that constitutes its own Reality - and is in order of
Thought, necessarily antecendent to the Things, in which it is, more or less adequately,
realized - while a Conception is as necessarily posterior'.18 Distortions in the work of textual
critics such as J G Eichhorn Coleridge attributes 'to the want of PHILOSOPHY, as the
Science of IDEAS in contradistinction from CONCEPTIONS'. 19 He maintains that 'Ideas and
Conceptions are utterly disparate, and Ideas and Images the negatives of each other'. 'Ideas are
not conceived but contemplated. They may be apprehended but not comprehended: a fortiori
therefore, not expressed'.20 This distinction between ideas and conceptions reflects the crucial
distinction between Reason, which gives birth to philosophy, and the lesser faculty of the
Understanding which deals in principles, concepts, quantities. It is Reason, in its relation to the
Will, which gives birth to ideas and therefore to philosophy proper. Coleridge wants to
maintain the

distinction between the Light of Reason in the Understanding, viz the absolute
Principles presumed in all Logic and the condition under which alone we draw
universal and necessary Conclusions from contingent and particular facts, and
the Reason itself, as the source and birthplace of IDEAS, and therefore in its
conversion to the Will the power of Ultimate Ends, of which Ideas only can be
the Subjects.21

Ideas, then, are indivisible unities; they 'cannot be composed or decomposed'. Two other
characteristics of ideas are given by Coleridge - first, they are self-evident, and second, they
are communicable only through polarity, through opposition. Although he admired Kant for
establishing this truth, he claimed that the seventeenth century divine, Richard Baxter, had
understood it earlier. As regards the first point - the self-evidence - Coleridge's position is
almost Cartesian: 'the Idea contains its' necessity in its' actual presence'.22 'Idea is a Truth
bearing in itself the insight of its' own necessity1.23 The second characteristic is given by the
following definition of ideas as 'intuitions not sensuous, which can be expressed only by
contradictory conceptions, or, to speak more accurately, are in themselves necessarily both
inexpressible and inconceivable, but are suggested by two contradictory positions'.24 The Idea
then 'as expressed in words, is always and necessarily, a contradiction in terms'.25 The
'common character., criterion and diagnostic' of Ideas is that 'they are expressible only by two
positions the one of which affirms what the other denies1.26

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Ideas and the Will

Coleridge's prioritizing of Will is the most significant difference between his theory of ideas
and that of Hegel, who sometimes seems to follow Spinoza's 'down-playing' of the distinction
between will and intellect. Spinoza had written: 'There is in the mind no volition, that is,
except that which an idea, in so far as it is an idea, involves...Corollary: Will and intellect are
one and the same thing. Proof- will and intellect are nothing but the particular volitions and
ideas. But a particular volition and idea are one and the same thing'.27 Similarly, for Hegel
there seems often to be no real distinction between will and idea. Although in one sense, the
freedom of the Idea is developed through the historical process, in another sense the Idea
seems simply free from the beginning. 'Reason is self-sufficient and contains its end within
itself; it brings itself into existence and carries itself into effect'.28 And again,'God and the
nature of the divine will are one and the same thing; it is what we call in philosophy the Idea.
Thus it is the Idea in general which we have to consider, and particularly its operation within
the medium of the human spirit; in more specific terms, it is the Idea of human freedom'.29'30
Hegel's treatment of the issues of freedom and actuality seems as open to the criticism
of presupposition as that of the Concept. Schelling claims that 'in the Idea there is no necessity
at all for any kind of movement. The Idea could not, for instance, progress further in itself (for
that is impossible, because it is already complete), but would rather have completely to break
away from itself...in the Idea itself there is, then, no necessity at all for progression or
becoming-other.' Hegel gives no proper justification, Schelling complains, for his assertion that
'"The Idea"...in the "truth of itself, resolves to release itself as nature, or in the form of being-
other, from itself". Schelling continues: 'This '"release" - the Idea releases nature - is one of
the strangest, most ambiguous and thus also timid expresssions behind which this philosophy
retreates at difficult points. Jacob Bohme says: divine freedom vomits itself into nature. Hegel
says: divine freedom releases nature. What is one to think in this notion of releasing?'31 In
recognising that Hegel gives no adequate explanation of the self-externalisation of the
Absolute into a non-Absolute, Dieter Wandschneider implies that the issue of the freedom of
the idea is also left without explanation.32

Hegel's own comments on this point are the shortest imaginable and of an obscurity
which is constantly deplored. He [Hegel] speaks, for example, of a "decision of the
pure idea to determine itself as an eternal idea". "As the totality in this form" this is
"nature." As the idea "voluntarily frees" itself in such a way, the "form of its
definiteness is "similarly simply free".33

For Hegel, then, Idea is often identified'both with Reason and with the divine Will. There is an
important contrast with Coleridge here, for whom Idea, both as the self-realized form of the
Absolute, and in the process of thought, is not to be identified with Will in Act; rather Idea is
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born out of a primal act of Will which is at the same time both eternally distinct from, and a
unity with, Reason. Elsewhere Coleridge goes so far as to say that 'the Idea is a particular
form of Will'.34 Because of this primacy of Will rather than Being, of'I am' rather than 'It is',
there is a point at which the real is more than the rational. This is so whether one begins with
nature as natura naturans, as power, energy, life itself and follows through to the evolution of
intelligence, or at the other end, so to speak, with an absolute Subject (Fichte) manifesting
itself somehow in the otherness of phenomena. We have seen that the 'parents' of the Idea,
according to him are Reason and Will; furthermore, will (which he insists is meaningless unless
it means freewill) - by its nature defies explanation. The Idea therefore shares the essential
underivability of will. It is ultimately mysterious.
But mystery is not the same as abstraction. Coleridge says in a notebook entry on the
Idea of Trinity that mystery 'is but another word for Idea'. He is anxious to maintain a
distinction between true mystery and the mysticism of religious enthusiasts. The former is
dynamic and transformative. Hence its representation in Scripture as 'Vision'.35 The main
mystery here is Will. Hegel's criticism of Schelling is in this sense correct. Nature cannot be
the starting-point; - but Coleridge is equally critical of Hegel's own starting-point of Concept,
the Absolute Idea. This only leads to abstractions,36 and to begin with an abstraction is to
begin with an Object, instead of the only adequate first principle which is the Subject, 'I am'.
To begin with an Object is to begin with Being (whether ideal or real), and to end with the
same circular identity of One is All, or pantheism. Once the trap is closed, the argument is
forced into ever decreasing circles. Coleridge admires Schelling's criticism of Hegel's claim of
presuppositionlessness but agrees with the latter's rejection of Nature as a replacement
presupposition to the concept. He criticizes Schelling's Absolute as 'no Idea, but a pure
Abstraction'; a similar judgement to that suggested by his marginalia on Hegel's Wissenschaft
der Logik. Hegel's denial that the Idea is an abstraction appeared to Coleridge to be merely
that - a denial, since no grounds are given to confirm the assertion that the Idea 'in its own self
... is essentially concrete, because it is the free notion giving character to itself, and that
character, reality'.37
Coleridge's theme of Idea as will-begotten colours his whole philosophy. He allows the
identity of Idea and Being - but only on the ground of a dynamic 'Prothesis'38 which is pure
act. To begin with Idea or Being is a false step. If presupposition, or according to Gadamer,
'prejudice', and according to Polanyi, the 'ontology of commitment',39 is accepted as not only
necessary but neutral, rather than negative, then Hegel's presupposition (despite his denial)
appears to have been the concept, Schelling's might be found as nature, and Fichte's, as the
self-conscious affirmation of freedom. Coleridge's 'prejudice' is one which he considers both
inescapable and related to the experienced fact of ideas as their own evidence; that of the
primacy of will. The reality of Being and Idea depends upon the dynamic reality of will and
relationship, of moral being and freedom. Consciousness is, then, dependent upon conscience
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which presupposes this freedom; this act of affirmation. Will begets Otherness which cannot,
for this reason, be subsumed under an onto-logic. The ultimate direction or purpose
presupposed by Will is the begetting of Logos. This is the point at which Coleridge attempts
to link Kant's Critiques, and to provide the ground by which he may move between moral and
natural philosophy, history, and religion.
For Coleridge, the birth of self-consciousness, of reason, is inseperable from morality.
Fichte had rightly recognized that the only starting point which could meet the sceptic's
challenge was an act of will. Neither abstract conception, nor the contingent determinations of
being in nature but only will in act provided a philosophical foundation. Immediately, this
clarifies the reality of the relation between a distinct Will and Reason which are ultimately
united. Coleridge's theory of the self-realization of the Absolute is based upon this reality of
relationship (Deus alter et idem, Alterity).40 In an Absolute Act and Will, the theme of
personeity and relationship is not a mere adjunct, but arises at and from the beginning. The
primal reality is then personal, rather than merely conceptual. So Coleridge offers a theology,
or a 'theanthropology'.41 A qualification should be made: although Will may thus be given
primacy and the response of will is therefore the starting point for philosophy, Coleridge
argues that this act of will, or leap of faith which Fichte identifies as being towards God or
Nature, must be an affirmation of the witness of experience, not merely a hopeful 'shot in the
dark'.42
Ideas, for Coleridge, can never be understood apart from this built-in factor of
relationship; but unlike Hegel, he insists that although relation necessarily implies limitation, it
need not imply negativity in the sense of inferiority, contradiction, or non-Being.43. Similarly -
and this has important implications for any postmodern interpretation of Coleridge -
particularity is not, for him, inferior in any sense. He insists that the limitation of form and
particularity must be distinguished from the limitation which implies weakness (for example,
the limitation of reach in an outstretched arm).44 Particularity is included within the Absolute
through the very relationships necessary to self-realization. It is therefore an error to begin
with the supposition of an Absolute which depends upon the realization of particular forms in
nature and self-conscious spirit.45 On the contrary, Coleridge begins by postulating the One in
whom all ideas are contained: 'or the realizing knowledge of all the particular forms potentially
involved in the absolute causativeness'. The Idea 'is itself but a particular Form of the
Absolute1.46 To suppose that the Absolute did not include within itself in all eternity the whole
plenitude of ideas would be to maintain that it could not comprehend the One Idea of its own
absoluteness. Were the Absolute to know only the universal - then it would indeed be a pure
abstraction.
Ideas as actual and potential
The complex network of argument through which Coleridge relates his theory of the will to a
concept of reality as both actual and potential cannot be adequately represented here. But in
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this area too there is a crucial difference with Hegel. Coleridge insists that 'under the idea
reality we have to find two opposites, both of which are reality though each a form opposite to
the other1.47 Moses Mendelssohn, according to Coleridge, is wrong to assume that 'actual' is 'a
mere & perfect synonyme' of real. In fact, 'the potential [is] the minus or negative pole of that
same unity, of which the actual is the plus or positive'.48 Coleridge agrees with classical
theology that God is pure Act - but avoids the accusation of self-contradiction by establishing
a fourth term in addition to the thesis-antithesis-synthesis identity. This Prothesis represents
the Absolute 'before' (for want of a better word) the point at which Absolute Being is self-
realized through the divine dynamic relations (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) of Will, Reason and
Love. The reality of this mysterious Prothesis must therefore be understood as both actual
and potential. Finite reality reflects this opposition. Coleridge will not allow, then, that only
that which is actual is real.49 For Hegel, possibility (potentiality) lacks reality; it is linked with
contingency as two lesser factors subsumed under actuality.50 For Coleridge, in contrast, both
potentiality and actuality are equally 'real'. He disagrees profoundly with what he sees as a
failure to understand the degrees of ideal reality - such as the Idea of the Will.51
These, then, are the grounds on which Coleridge's 'ideal Realism' differs from both
Hegel's and Schelling's. The dichotomy between ideal and real is, he insists, a false one
because ideas are constitutive of reality; ideas themselves, supreme realities, may be actual or
potential. It is ideas that bridge the gap between finite and infinite, the One and the many.
Coleridge often adopts the language of neo-Platonism to affirm that the 'Idea of ideas' is
Logos, the infinite in the form of the finite, containing the whole pleroma of ideas both actual
and potential. It is false, he insists, to suggest that what is potential in nature becomes actual,
and only then real, in the idea; ideas themselves have degrees of reality - Tower, Potentia' is
always their characteristic, but whereas the Idea is perfectly realized in Logos, ideas are
'inadequate in the World of Degrees'.52 The implications of this are important: for example,
any totalitarian possibility is thereby removed from Coleridge's system of 'ideal Realism' in its
political application to the idea of the nation or state. 53
The Language of Ideas
To Coleridge it is clear that the 'language' of ideas is not that of the speculative intellect (the
Understanding, Verstand). Ideas are the realities through which passion, morality, spiritual and
aesthetic development, experience and creativity are reconciled. On this basis the necessity of
a metaphysic is self-evident, albeit in a post-Kantian sense. The language appropriate to
empirical science, even the language of logic or mathematics is inadequate for the truth of
ideas and this conclusion, rather than some kind of flight of fancy or leap into religious
enthusiasm, leads Coleridge to develop the theme of the revelatory function of the symbols,
and to use a wide range of 'languages' (in the Wittgenstinian sense) in his own work. These
vary from the language of transcendental logic, to that of the latest scientific advances, to
phrases borrowed from Jewish or Christian mysticism, or from neo-Platonism. In his attempts
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to express the revelatory, self-evident and transformative nature of ideas the mixture is
evident.34 The use and abuse of language is always an important focus of his philosophy. An
impatient notebook reference to Hegel criticises the tatter's position 'in so far as he means
anything'. This note is similar in tone to Coleridge's marginalia to Hegel's Wissenschaft der
Logik which reveal an impatience with obscurity and muddle caused by what he judges to be
an imprecise use of language.53
Logos represents both Word and Idea to Coleridge, thus all philosophy - as the truth
of ideas - is dependent upon its relation to language and vice versa. Further, the incarnation
of Word (whether understood historically, philosophically or in the Christian revelation)
involves the incarnation of 'Idea'. Again, the nature and function of the symbol reveals the
word to be a reconciler of the universal and the particular, the infinite and the finite through
the medium of the human imagination.56 We have seen that Coleridge differs from Hegel in
giving theology, or 'theanthropology', primacy over ontology. It is consistent then, for him to
use the language of theology to express what he sees as the truth of ideas. But his concept of
the symbol is another factor here. He insists that the adequate communication of ideas is
dependent upon the revelatory power of the symbol, through the faculty of imagination.
Symbols themselves are 'incarnational' (the revelation of the universal in and through the
particular, historical, contingent) and ideas, as constitutive, are the basis of philosophy. An
Idea 'presents to the mind the Particular in the the Universal, and is itself but a particular Form
of the Absolute1.57 The symbol 'partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while
it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the
representative'.38 The Idea in the highest sense is 'the Universal in the Individual... the Glance
and the Exponent of the indwelling Power1.59 Clearly both symbol and idea are Reconcilers. It
is on this basis that Coleridge understands the relation between thought and language. Hegel
says that language is 'the body of thought'60 but for Coleridge it is also the power of thought; it
is constitutive of, as well as constituted by, thought.
Hegel recognizes that the truths of philosophy can be expressed in the language of
religion but at times his blend of the two seems a mere decoration, or perhaps a way of
presenting an idea in a different light for its greater illumination. Coleridge, in contrast,
suggests that the analogy of the Logos as Word is that which fully reveals and communicates
the Logos as Idea. There is no sense that the blend of philosophical and religious language is
a poetic concession when he affirms, for example, that 'the distinctities in the pleroma are the
eternal ideas, the subsistential truths; each considered in itself, an infinite in the form of the
finite; but all considered as one with the unity, the eternal Son, they are the energies of the
finific'.61
Since it is through the Idea, the Word, Logos, that philosophy and theology are
reconciled in the fullest sense, Coleridge's use of the language of, for example, Trinitarian
theology cannot fairly be categorized as a retreat from philosophical issues. For him, the idea
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of Trinity is as much a philosophical as a theological necessity: 'The Trinity is indeed the

primary Idea, out of which all other Ideas are evolved - or as the Apostle says, it is the
Mystery (which is but another word for Idea) in which are hidden all the Treasures of
knowledge. But from this very case it is the example & representative of all Ideas - it is the
common attribute of all, that the Absolute exists in the plenitude of its' eternal Forms, entire in
each and indivisibly one in all'.62
Coleridge's recognition that the relation between language and ideas is crucial to
philosophy; and that language must not be understood as merely the tool of concepts was
shared by many of his contemporaries. His own inspiration was derived not only from the
range of etymological studies and histories produced in his own time, but also from patristic
and classical theology, particularly from a re-reading of early theologies of the Word (Origen,
Augustine) through the lense of German philosophy. For him, words are living realities. His
Logos, unlike Hegel's, is the source of that knowledge attainable through imagination, so the
symbols and analogies of religious language are not merely 'figurative' (in the sense of less
rigorously rational) expressions - but must be accepted as both constitutive and revelatory.
Coleridge's mixture of 'language-games' is not unreflective. He is aware that the
ultimately mysterious nature of ideas creates a problem. How is philosophical discourse
possible on this basis without falling into Fichtean solipsism? The whole project appears to
confirm Levinas' criticism of the imperialist drive in the history of western thought to reduce
the 'Other' to the 'Same' - ie the subject.63 Coleridge's view is that the reconciliation of subject
and object takes place through language, through the imagination, through symbol. Idea
cannot be separated from words any more than Logos can be interpreted as Word and not as
Idea. This being so, there is a dynamic and evolutionary thrust within philosophy itself- there
can never be an aufliebung in which final mastery over difference is achieved. Words are
dynamic, sent out, 'Outered' in Coleridge's pun. They reflect and participate in the nature of
the Logos, or, in religious language, the Word of the Father, spoken out in an eternal self-
realizing relation, the Word which brings life and light, the Act of Genesis and the 'life and
light' of the Fourth Gospel. Language (and thus philosophy itself) cannot be separated either
from the freedom of the will in which words are 'outered' or from the necessity of their self-
constituting relations. There is no final static 'truth' to be attained which is not contained
within the communicated and communicating life process of Word and Idea. Lacan has
developed a similar theme in the late twentieth century as Slavoj Zizek shows in 'The Truth
arises from Misrecognition': it is that 'our path towards truth coincides with the truth itself,
'the secret is in the narration itself.64
So, although Coleridge reflects somewhat despairingly on 'the passage from the
absolute to the separated finite, this is the difficulty which who shall overcome?'65, he himself
suggests at least the direction in which fruitful insights may be gained. The gap is bridged
through Logos, the Word - not only in the ontological sense of Logos as the principle of
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alterity, of Otherness, but also in the theological sense of incarnation, and in the psycho-social
and historical sense in which language is seen to be a life, a process which transforms as it
evolves. So, as archetypal symbol, the Word communicates the truth of ideas. If, in the
infinite, Logos is the form of the finite, so the incarnate Logos (in the religious, the
philosophical, and the linguistic sense) represents and communicates the infinite, the universal
which is metaphysically presupposed by the existence of the finite.
The ideas forming and formed by human consciousness reflect this polarity of which
the 'coeternal Logos' is the source.
Another aspect of the divine Idea represented in human reason is its nature as Will-
begotten in and through relationship (Love - represented by Coleridge as the third Person of
the Trinity). The point here is that relationship is never subsumed into Sameness; the
distinctions are eternal. Human language and reason (that is, the truth of ideas as distinct from
the faculty of the Understanding) reflect this reality, inclusive, we might say, of the desire and
differance which postmodernism has elevated, in imagination, conscience, feeling and
relationship.
From this point of view a different light is thrown on Coleridge's assertion that ideas
'correspond to substantial beings, to objects whose actual subsistence is implied in their idea,
though only by the idea revealable'. Again, his imitation of the language of St Paul in
describing them as '"spiritual realities that can only spiritually be discerned"1,66 is clearly, given
this context, not a retreat to abstraction, to universals, to mysticism. True, he can still insist
that such ideas as those of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth, of the good, the true,
the beautiful, the infinite, define what it is to be human. He is still prepared to maintain of
Man that Ideas 'constitute his reality'; on the other hand, 'it is the privilege of the few to
possess an idea: of the generality of men, it might be more truly affirmed that they are
possessed by it1.67
Conclusion
It has been possible to trace some crucial differences between Coleridge's contribution of an
'ideal Realism' and Hegel's development of the Idea. Those differences concern language, the
issue of actuality and potentiality, the question of the relation of freewill and of Reason to the
idea. We have also seen Coleridge's criticism of abstraction - and his refusal of either the
concept, or of nature as a starting point. These differences are reflected and become more
clearly defined in his explorations of the idea of Nature, of Beauty, of the State, and of the
Person.
Alan White has suggested that the question as to whether Hegel's system satisfies
philosophy's criteria 'could be answered easily only if we knew in advance precisely what
philosophy's criteria are'. The problem is that 'those of us who are not already in possession of
the highest truth do not'.68 However, Coleridge's argument is that these criteria are a matter of
progressive revelation, of encounter, of'finding'. He insists that true knowledge is dependent
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upon an ontological and moral development in which the individual has become the person,
and the self is found in relation to the other. This realization of personhood, expressed
through his 'theanthropology', would provide the sine qua non of all knowledge, the ground of
all logic, concepts, the understanding, the empirically-based sciences. The criterion of an 'ideal
Realism' then is, as in the idealisms of the period, the self; but a self found only in and through
relation. This is not the all-encompassing Subject which draws all things into itself.
For such as F H Jacobi and Coleridge then, philosophy's criteria can be established:
they are personhood and relationality,69 the basis not only of all ontological, moral,
intellectual, and spiritual reality, but also the bridge between the knowing subject and the
natural world. Further, Coleridge would emphasise the common ground of philosophy and
language. To Wittgenstein's insistence that 'whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be
silent1 Coleridge's would respond with Logos, the analogy of the Word. It is this, which makes
him bold enough to assert that:'Religion, in its most perfect form, ...is Philosophy elevated
from Idea into Act and Fact by a superinduction ab [extra] of the <extrinsic> Conditions of
Realization and Reality1.70
Alan White has also pointed out that' ...no matter how Hegel may have understood his
claim [to have completed philosophy], in a certain historical sense philosophy does terminate
with his system ... .After Hegel's time, first philosophy, traditionally known as metaphysics, is
no longer revered as queen of the sciences'.71 Whether or not Hegel brought about the end of
metaphysics, Schelling sensed the need to stress the task and goal of philosophy as he saw it:
'...when I see in philosophy the means of healing the dismemberment that characterises our
time, I of course do not mean a weak philosophy, a mere artifact, I mean a strong philosophy,
one that can measure itself by life, one that, far from feeling powerless in the face of life and its
atrocious realities, far from being limited to the sorry occupation of mere negation and
destruction, would take its force from reality itself and would then also produce something
actual and lasting'.72 Schelling does not share Hegel's aversion to positive philosophy. 'Never
before' he writes, 'has there arisen...so massive a reaction against philosophy as is visible at
present. This proves that philosophy has come to the point of encounter with those questions
of life in the face of which it is not permissible - indeed, not posible - for anyone to be
indifferent. As long as philosophy is involved with its first beginnings or with the first stages
of its development, it is the concern only of those who have made philosophy their lifework.
All others await the end of philosophy; it becomes important for the world only in its results'.73
Coleridge himself believed that a crisis point had been reached in philosophy, exemplified in
the pre-occupations of his younger contemporaries: N o one seems to have any distinct
convictions, right or wrong; the mind is completely at sea, rolling and pitching on the waves of
facts and personal experiences'.74 For him, the cause of such 'rolling and pitching' was closely
associated with the misunderstanding of the term 'Idea1, not least with its confusion with the
Concept on the one hand, and with image or object of thought on the other. His 'ideal
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Realism' attempts to counter such confusion. Expressed fragmentarily but powerfully in his
published and unpublished writings, it now seems prophetic in anticipation of philosophical
'dead ends' and an interesting corrective to the extremes of both empiricism and idealism. In,
as it might be, final repudiation of the Hegelian system, the following passage rings loud and
clear:' As the vital power compared with the mechanic, as a Father compared with a Moulder
in wax or clay, such is the Power of Ideas compared with the influence of Conceptions and
Notions!'.75 'I am', Coleridge writes,' at once waiting for, watching, organically constructing
and inwardly constructed by, the Ideas, the living Truths, that may be re-excited but cannot be
expressed by Words, the Transcendents that give the Objectivity to all Objects, the Form to all
Images, yet are themselves untranslatable into any Image, unrepresentable by any particular
Object'.76 The paradoxes and polarities here are typical. The direction, the dynamics, the
faith - all these are 'positive' but there are no rigid certainties, no totalitarian under-tow; the
(///realism of which idealisms of all kinds are accused is absent. Coleridge answers the 'doctors
of the Absolute' with an appeal not to philosophical relativity but to relationality - that is, to
an 'ideal Realism' in which Idea is 'a Power...that consitutes its own Reality'. This power is
communicated through process and polarity which can never, because distinction and
limitation are co-eternal with unity, reach stasis or identity. Nor does Coleridge's philosophy
allow an all-absorbing subject; he is at pains to emphasize that only in the necessarily temporal
bounds of conceptuality must the relationality of ultimate reality appear to 'begin' with the Act
of the Subject. Idealism in this sense, then, has nothing in common with that rejection of
locality, spontaneity, particularity and adaptibility which is often the implicit accusation from
postmodern criticism. Rather it seems to offer comprehensiveness without rigidity, to avoids
even the hidden reductionisms. It offers a dynamic relationality which is unconstrained by
system and within which the creativity of all true opposition (as opposed to self-contradiction)
is always welcome.
Mary Anne Perkins
Kingston University

1 The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
2 See Perkins, M A, "Logic and Logos': the search for unity in Hegel and Coleridge'
Heythrop Journal (XXXII); part I: 'Alienation and the Logocentric Response' (Jan.
1991), pp 1-25 part II: 'The "Otherness" of God1 (April, 1991), pp 192-215; part III: 'A
Different Logos' (July 1991), pp 340-54.
3 The Statesman's Manual (SM) in Lay Sermons, ed R J White (Collected Works of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (CQ, 5; Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1972),
p 114.
4 On the Constitution of the Church and State (C&S), ed John Colmer (CC 10.;
Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1976), p 47.
5 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (CN) ed K Coburn & Merle Christenson
(5 vols.; Princeton, NJ, Routledge & Kegan Paul & Princeton University Press, 1957-),
iv 5293
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6 Table Talk (77), ed Carl Woodring (CC, 14; 2 vols; Princeton NJ, Princeton
University Press, 1990), i. pp 173-74.
7 Marginalia (CM), ed George Whalley (CC, 12; 4 vols; Princeton, NJ, Princeton
University Press, 1980-), i p 682.
8 Annotations t o K W F SolgerPhilosophische Gesprache (Berlin, 1817).
9 C&S, p47.
10 'On the Divine Ideas1, fo 229.
11 Aids to Reflection (AR), ed John Beer (CC 9, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University
Press), p 182.
12 5IMSEgerton2801, fo 82.
13. Marginalia to Tennemann, W G, Geschichte der Philosophie, (12 vols; Leipzig, 1798-
1817), vi p.45; written on blank leaves at back of volume.
14 Biographia Literaria (BL), ed James Engell & W Jackson Bate (CC, 7; 2 vols;
Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series, 1983), i 97.
15 C&S, p 18.
16 SM, pp 113-14.
17. SM, p 101. For more on Coleridge's distinction between idea and eidolon - see BL i
p 97: 'Plato adopted [I5ea] as a technical term, and as the antithesis to eyScoXa, or
sensuous images; the transient and perishable emblems, or mental words, of ideas. The
ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, and
exempt from time.'
18 CM, ii p 1134. Coleridge's marginalia on Hooker's Works are revealing in their
description of the latter as 'a comprehensive, rich, vigorous, discreet and discretive,
CONCEPTUALIST- but not an Ideist.-' CM, ii p 1147.
19 CM, ii p 500.
20 CN, iv 5288.
21 CN, iv 5293.
22 Notebook (N) 37, f 44v.
23 N50, f34v (1831).
24 CM,iipl52.
25 C&S, p 17.
26 #34, fo 12v.
27 Ethics, prop 49.
28 Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, (LPWH), translated
by H B Nisbet (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975), p 28.
29 LPWH, p 46.
30 Ibid (LPWH), p 46.
31 Schelling, F W J., On the History of Modern Philosophy (1833-4) translated by
Andrew Bowie, in G WF Hegel Critical Assessments, ed R Stern (Routledge, 1993 ) I
iv pp 57-8. Schelling quotes the last paragraph of the first part of the Encyklopddie der
philosophische Wissenschaften, [first edit §191; 2nd ed §244],
32 TSTature and the Dialectic of Nature in Hegel's Objective Idealism', Dieter
Wandschneider, in Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 26 (Autumn/Winter
1992), pp 30-51.
33 Wandschneider, p 33; quotation from Hegel, Werke, ed Hermann Glockner, (Stuttgart,
1955), vol 5, p 352.
34 'On the Divine Ideas', fo 37. Coleridge is aware of the apparent contradiction here:
'because no particular form can be absolutely real - ie in the Godhead', but he attempts
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a solution: 'To God the idea is real, inasmuch as it is one with that Will, which , as we
see in its definition, is verily Idem et Alter, but to itself the idea is absolutely real, in so
far only as its particular Will affirms, & in affirming constitutes its partiular reality to
have no true being, except as a form of the universal, & one with the universal Will.
This however is the affirmation of a Will and of a particular Will. It must therefore
contain the potentiality, that is, the power of possibly not affirming the identity of its
reality with the reality of God, which is actual absolutely.1 (ODI ff 39-41)
35 SeeegC&S, p 58; and AT 36, f74v.
36 CN, iv 4910, f73v.
37 Hegel's Logic, translated by W. Wallace (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975),
p275.
38 For an explanation of the 'Prothesis' term see Coleridge's Philosophy, p 9, n 33.
39 Personal Knowledge (London, 1958), p 379.
40 See Perkins, Coleridge's Philosophy, p 121, 136-171, 208, 230.
41 For those who Still flinch at this nod in the direction of the authority of the subject: -
Coleridge's subject, is one which cannot be realised except through relationship; nor is
this relationship based on an ontology, but rather a moral act. It is therefore not one in
which the Subject gradually absorbs the Other (see E Levinas, Totality and Infinity,
translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, 1969), p 36). In this respect Coleridge
should escape Levinas's criticism of western ontology as involving 'a reduction of the
other to the same by an interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the
comprehension of being' (p 43).
42 It is important to note that for Coleridge this experience may be that of a constant
inner witness, it need not be confined to the senses.
43 See 'Logic and Logos', part II: 'The "Otherness" of God' (April, 1991), pp 192-215.
44 See OM, vol 1; for a further example of Coleridge's references to Plato's refusal to
allow the One to be called infinite, - God is 'the Measure of Infinity1- see C&S, p 168.
45 'On the Divine Ideas' f 3 5.
46 CN, iv 5294.
47 'On the Divine Ideas', f 29.
48 Ibid (ODI) f 53.
49 CN, iii 4445
50 Hegel's Logic, section 144.
51 'The error of Schelling as of Spinoza before him and indeed of all the doctors of the
Absolute is that they consider Ens and Non-Ens as having no possible intermediates or
degrees'. Coleridge includes Hegel 'as far as he means anything' among those who
make 'so much and such frequent use of the Nothing constituting all things out of 1
and 0 '. They then 'attach to this 0 the infinity of all numbers as the ground of number
and then by a mere numerical process explain everything simply because the 0 means
every thing that is not in the 1 and that too.' Schelling and Hegel refuse to allow that
the potential may also be the real, as they confound 'reality, as a primary Self-
revelation or Idea having itself for its Object of Ideation with the generic term
Reality' - it is the latter, Coleridge acknowledges, which has no degrees. The Will is
'real' both as actual and potential. (CN, iii 4445).
52 Egerton2801,f81v.
53 See e.g. marginalia to Hooker's Works: CM, ii p 1148.
54 The following passage illustrates this blending of traditions: 'whatever actually is, even
for ourselves, is this wholly & solely by the presence of the Deity to the mind & that
sense itself as if it were an opake reason is possible only by a communion with that life
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which is the light of men, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, &
without which the solar light would be a contradiction in thought, a powerless power,
a light that is darkness - this idea, next to that of the Will, or rather with it, is the great
master key, not only of all speculative science[,] physical as well as metaphysical.
Without a clear apprehension of truth, such as the mind can rest on with inward quiet,
even the conception of the absolute Will as conveyed logically in the definition so often
repeated, is neither safe nor worthy the name of an idea' (ODI63).
55 Coleridge particularly objects to what he takes to be Hegel's opposition of'Seyn' and
"Nichts1, for example,in the Wissenschaft der Logik (I i 41-43); see CM, ii pp 989-994.
56 See BL, i p 156 and n. In connecting ideas with imagination Coleridge implies that in
and through ideas the problem of the Ding->an-sich is overcome.
57 CN, iv 5294.
58 SM, p 30.
59 CAT,iii4397f53.
60 Logic (Wallace), p 206.
61 Literary Remains, ed H N Coleridge (4 vols; London, William Pickering & Sons,
1836-1839), vol 3, p 2.
62 CN, iv 5294.
63 E Levinas, Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, 1969),
p36.
64 Slavoj Zizek, 'The Truth Arises from Misrecognition' in Lacan and the Subject of
Language edited by EUie Ragland-SuUivan and Mark Bracher (New York and London,
1991), p 197.
65 'On the Divine Ideas', f 11.
66 C&S, p 47.
67 C&S, p 13.
68 A White, Absolute Knowledge: Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics (Athens, Ohio,
1983), p 9.
69 See Perkins, Coleridge's Philosophy, Chapter 4: 3.
70 CN, iii 4489.
71 White explains: 'whereas he [Hegel] presents that system as the culmination of a
coherent tradition that began in ancient Greece, the most notorious post-Hegelian
thinkers - including Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger - explicitly oppose
that tradition' (p 1).
72 'Einleitung in die Philosophie der Offenbarung oder Begrundung der positiven
Philosophic in Sammtliche Werke, 14 vols (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J G Cotta'scher
Verlag, 1856-61; reprint edition of selected works, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1974-76.), vol 13: 11) translated and quoted in White, Absolute
Knowledge, p 95.
73 Schelling, Sammtliche Werke, 14: 363; quoted in translation by A White, Absolute
Knowledge p 93.
74 7T, iip 119.
75 CM, iip 1148.
76 K Coburn (ed), Inquiring Spirit, 2nd edn (London, Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1979),
p 214; quoted from # 5 2 , f5v.

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