The Providential Wreck: Coleridge and Spinoza’s Metaphysics

Abstract

Coleridge’s understanding of Spinoza lies at the heart of his entire intellectual life, and has much to tell us about the intellectual undercurrents operating in the period. Spinoza is linked, through his monism and pantheism, to the mystical possibilities that are broached in the ‘One Life within us and abroad’ passage added to The Eolian Harp in 1817 and more generally throughout Coleridge and Wordsworth’s early poetry. The sense of a world in which God is ‘At once the Soul of each, and God of All’ is inevitably a sense of a world in which we are participants, as finite beings interconnected with an immanent God—potentially a Spinozistic world. Such a worldview deeply problematizes the status and identity of both finite individuals and God, and therefore has the potential to deprive the world of meaning, even as it seeks to imbue the world of nature with new meaning. The crisis of reason in German thought (the Pantheismusstreit) was not over Spinozism as a matter of chance, it was over Spinozism because Spinozism drives the central questions of reason to their crisis, forcing the recognition that the project of rational metaphysics (and by implication science) is leading to the surrender of the humanistic soul, to a world of mechanical sterility. It is my argument that Coleridge’s ultimate engagements with German idealism are deeply informed by this crisis, and this double vision of Spinoza: in Spinozism Coleridge sees the ‘one life’ and the ‘inanimate cold world’ superimposed on one another, and he never escapes the torment of it.1