Coleridge, Mendelssohn and the Defence of Reason

Abstract

Mendelssohn has attracted little attention among Coleridgean scholars, perhaps because his conservative intellectual position did not seem to co-ordinate that well with the image of the ‘transcendentalist’ Coleridge. And yet, Moses Mendelssohn is a central figure for Coleridge because of the crucial role he played in the pantheism controversy with his attempt to defend reason and traditional metaphysics against the encroachments of both Jacobi and Kant.1 Coleridge’s own interest in the idea of the immediate element in knowledge (a la Jacobi), along with his interest in defending some positive role for reason made Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunden—with its attempt to wrest reason away from both Jacobi’s anti-rationalism and Kant’s critique—a crucial text for Coleridge. Indeed, his understanding of the conflict between these three positions plays a decisive role in the development of his own account of the distinction between reason and understanding.