Coleridge, Hume, and the Principles of Political Knowledge

Abstract

Coleridge, Hume, and the Principles of Political Knowledge Timothy Michael (bio) Timothy Michael The University of Chicago Timothy Michael Timothy Michael is Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “British Romanticism and the Principles of Political Knowledge.” Footnotes 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1976) 755. 2. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 154. 3. This is not to say that the focus in Romanticism on the dialectic between reason and imagination is not without its own justification. One only needs to think of Wordsworth’s claim in the Mt. Snowdon episode that the imagination is “reason in her most exalted mood” (The Prelude 14); or, of the many instances in Coleridge’s philosophical development, his fascination with Lessing during his 1798 stay in Germany, when it was precisely the “mingling and interpenetration of reason and imagination” that attracted him to Lessing. The understanding may fit uneasily into a conflict of mental faculties—where, in a Blakean context, the struggle between Urizen and Ore contains the most drama—but this incongruity reveals, I think, what is most interesting and distinctive about Coleridge’s political thought. 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969) 176. Unless noted otherwise, all quotations from The Friend come from the 1818 version (Vol. l of The Friend in the Collected Works), hereafter cited as F in the text, as this was the last edition Coleridge saw through the press. 5. Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C. T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966). 6. See Kant’s discussion of “principlcs” in the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 387–88. 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (CPrR) in Practical Philosophy, trans, and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 153. 8. This “Kantian/Coleridgean” version of Romanticism is hardly the result of a generation of philosophically-minded critics. It extends to some of Coleridge’s earliest critics, such as J. S. Mill: “Now the Germano-Coleridgean doctrine is, in our view of the matter, the result of such a reaction. It expresses the revolt of the human mind against the philosophy of the eighteenth century. It is ontological, because that was experimental; conservative, because that was innovative; religious, because so much of that was infidel; concrete and historical, because that was abstract and metaphysical; poetical, because that was matter-of-fact and prosaic. In every respect it flies off in a contrary direction to its predecessor…” Complete Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. 10. ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1969) 125. 9. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 41. 10. Cairns Craig, “Coleridge, Hume, and the Chains of the Romantic Imagination” in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) 32. 11. Seamus Perry, “Enlightened Romantics” in Times Literary Supplement (5920, August 20, 2004): 7–8. 12. S. T. Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (CL), ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–) 2: 928. 13. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (BL), Vol. 1, ed. James Engell and W. Jaekson Bate (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) 291. 14. S. T. Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual (SM) in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972) 22. 15. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Part 7. Philo, the hard-lined skeptic, relates to Cleanthes, the more cautious skeptic, the Brahmin theory that the “world arose from an infinite spider, who spun this whole complicated mass from his bowels, and annihilates afterwards the whole or any part of it, by absorbing it again and resolving it into his own essence.” The argument that a possible world exists wholly inhabited by these spiders prompts Philo to assert “Why an orderly system may not be spun from the belly as well as from...