The Providential Wreck: Coleridge and Spinoza’s Metaphysics

Abstract

Understanding Coleridge’s understanding of Spinoza has been a major difficulty for scholars interested in Coleridge’s philosophical engagements. The issue is of unrivalled importance because the figure of Spinoza was absolutely central to German thought in the period, so that without understanding the tensions at work in Coleridge’s understanding of Spinoza it is impossible to do full justice to the complexity of his engagements with German idealism. Thomas McFarland’s account in Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition relies on a distinction between two types of philosophy; the philosophy of the “It is,” and the “I am,” and locates Spinoza as the prime exemplum of the “It is.” However, the figure of Spinoza was hotly contested in the period, and many understood Spinoza in a quasi‐mystical light, refusing to see him as a materialist “it is” thinker, so that to read him in this way is to beg the very question of the Pantheismusstreit. In this essay I argue that Coleridge’s difficulty with Spinoza was not that he was torn between two ways of doing philosophy, of which Spinoza represented one, but rather that he was torn between multiple ways of understanding Spinoza that were left in intractable tension. The double‐vision that Coleridge was tormented by; the tension between the “one life” (The Eolian Harp) and the “inanimate cold world” (Dejection), is derived from this fundamental tension.