L42-03-06-14-205

1. L42-03-06-14-205 • After the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 2nd ed. 1787) • The burden of the critique is that the traditional, rationalist / idealist view of Reason was fundamentally in error. The Ideas of Reason (God, Immortality, Freedom) are all systematically subject to antinomies, so direct, intuitive knowledge of them is not possible. • The immediate reaction of his German heirs and students— • Herder, his student and a key figure in the development of Romanticism, foregrounding enthusiasm and feeling, opposed Kant as too attached to Enlightenment • Fichte, a rising philosophical presence, presumed that Kant’s denial of knowledge of the Thing in Itself was an error, and sought it in self-consciousness • Schelling, a colleague of Fichte, developed a related system of Transcendental Idealism, that put the self at the absolute center • Hegel (and Hölderlin), both graduates of Lutheran theological seminaries, were convinced that Kant must be wrong, since knowledge of God was exactly what they insisted on. • All objected to “dualism” in Kant: between the Phenomena and Noumena, sensibility and understanding, mental and physical. All sought some form of monism, a single unifying principle. • But Kant saw that just such a belief was precisely what produces contradictions and pardoxes

2. Post Kant, Kant continuing • KANT, HOWEVER, HAD MOVED ON (1783) "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics" (1784) "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" (1784) "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" (1785) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1786) “What does it mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (1786) Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1787) Second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1788) Critique of Practical Reason (1790) Critique of the Power of Judgement (1793) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1795) Perpetual Peace (1797) Metaphysics of Morals Fichte: (1795) Science of Knowledge Schelling: (1800) System of Transcendental Idealism NATURPHILOSOPHIE Hegel:(1807) Phenomenology of Spirit; (1811) Science of Logic All missed the point: the “dualism” is not a fault, but the central insight: knowledge IS CONSTRUCTED, and MEDIATION is necessary.

3. The missing link: close work on judgment The move to moral philosophy: freedom by way of moral law The chief issue is that the categories do not allow for the manifest growth of knowledge First problem: imagination. It is the primary power of synthesis Second problem: determinative and reflective judgment The Critique of the Power of Judgment: from Art to knowledge to a vision of society

4. COLERIDGE (1772-1834) Look at the pattern: Kant: from philosophy to morality to art: Hinge: the faculty of judgment. Two kinds: determinative and reflective. Where can one see the power of judgment as it is for itself? IN IMAGINATIVE ART, and it leads to a radical reconception of organic nature and society. Coleridge: from Poetry and Imaginative Literature to the “Science of Method” and philosophy and religion.

5. The Friend & Biographia, 1818 A point on the method of critical thinking: p. 299 • In the perusal of philosophical works I have been greatly benefited by a resolve, which, in the antithetic form and with the allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim, I have been accustomed to word thus: until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. This golden rule of mine does, I own, resemble those of Pythagoras in its obscurity rather than in its depth. If however the reader will permit me to be my own Hierocles, I trust, that he will find its meaning fully explained by the following instances. I have now before me a treatise of a religious fanatic, full of dreams and supernatural experiences. I see clearly the writer's grounds, and their hollowness. I have a complete insight into the causes, which through the medium of his body has acted on his mind; and by application of received and ascertained laws I can satisfactorily explain to my own reason all the strange incidents, which the writer records of himself. And this I can do without suspecting him of any intentional falsehood. As when in broad day- light a man tracks the steps of a traveller, who had lost his way in a fog or by a treacherous moonshine, even so, and with the same tranquil sense of certainty, can I follow the traces of this bewildered visionary. I understand his ignorance. • On the other hand, I have been re-perusing with the best energies of my mind the TIMAEUS of Plato. Whatever I comprehend, impresses me with a reverential sense of the author's genius; but there is a considerable portion of the work, to which I can attach no consistent meaning. In other treatises of the same philosopher, intended for the average comprehensions of men, I have been delighted with the masterly good sense, with the perspicuity of the language, and the aptness of the inductions. I recollect likewise, that numerous passages in this author, which I thoroughly comprehend, were formerly no less unintelligible to me, than the passages now in question. It would, I am aware, be quite fashionable to dismiss them at once as Platonic jargon. But this I cannot do with satisfaction to my own mind, because I have sought in vain for causes adequate to the solution of the assumed inconsistency. I have no insight into the possibility of a man so eminently wise, using words with such half-meanings to himself, as must perforce pass into no meaning to his readers. When in addition to the motives thus suggested by my own reason, I bring into distinct remembrance the number and the series of great men, who, after long and zealous study of these works had joined in honouring the name of Plato with epithets, that almost transcend humanity, I feel, that a contemptuous verdict on my part might argue want of modesty, but would hardly be received by the judicious, as evidence of superior penetration. Therefore, utterly baffled in all my attempts to understand the ignorance of Plato, I conclude myself ignorant of his understanding.

6. METHOD • until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. • To get to the positive stance, one must understand both the history and the destination. • First Essay on Method: • WHAT is that which first strikes us. and strikes us at once, in a man of education? And which, among educated men, so instantly distinguishes the man of superior mind, that as was observed with eminent propriety of the late Edmund Burke) "we cannot stand under the same arch-way during a shower of rain, without finding him out?" . . . this must be, and in fact is, the true cause of the impression made on us. It is the unpremeditated and evidently habitual arrangement of his words, grounded on the habit of foreseeing, in each integral part, or (more plainly) in every sentence, the whole that he then intends to communicate. However irregular and desultory his talk, there is method in the fragments.

7. Coleridge: Polymathic Read entire contents of Carlyle Cathedral Library by age 18 Poetry, Journalism, Politics, &c. The short version of the Friend saga Science: Humphrey Davy, Michael Faraday, Beddoes, Whewell: Coined the word “scientist” which Whewell popularized The “Apostle’s Club” at Cambridge, John Serling: James Clerk Maxwell Peirce: “Coleridge taught Europe Science” In the US: a complete edition of Coleridge, including these essays, in the late 1830s. The title page opposite, 1847 The impact of these essays

8. Relations, Initiative, Education as “well of springing water” • METHOD, therefore, becomes natural to the mind which has been accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things, either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the hearers. To enumerate and analyze these relations, with the conditions under which alone they are discoverable, is to teach the science of Method. • a staple, or starting-post in the narrator himself; from the absence of the leading Thought, which, borrowing a phrase from the nomenclature of legislation, we may not inaptly call the INITIATIVE.

9. Relations: Law, Theory, Idea two kinds of relation, in which objects of mind may be contemplated. The first is that of LAW, which, in its absolute perfection, is conceivable only of the Supreme Being, whose creative IDEA not only appoints to each thing its position, but in that position, and in consequence of that position, gives it its qualities, yea, it gives its very existence, as that particular thing.

10. Theory • THE second relation is that of THEORY, in which the existing forms and qualities of objects, discovered by observation or experiment, suggest a given arrangement of many under one point of view: and this not merely or principally in order to facilitate the remembrance, recollection, or communication of the same; but for the purposes of understanding, and in most instances of controlling, them. In other words, all THEORY supposes the general idea of cause and effect. The scientific arts of Medicine, Chemistry. and of Physiology in general, are examples of a method hitherto founded on this second sort of relation. • Between these two lies the Method in the FINE ARTS,[1] which belongs indeed to this second or external relation, because the effect and position of the parts is always more or less influenced by the knowledge and experience of their previous qualities; but which nevertheless constitute a link connecting the second form of relation with the first. For in all, that truly merits the name of Poetry in its most comprehensive sense, there is a necessary pre-dominance of the Ideas (i.e. of that which originates in the artist himself), and a comparative indifference of the materials. [1] Cf “On Poesy or Art”: BL (1907) II 253-63.

11. diagrammatically IDEA Law Theory Fine Arts NO division between science and art, a recognition that an IDEA is not a concept, but a term of relation. From On Constitution of Church and state: Tautegorical Coleridge takes the next step past Kant, to insist on a new term of relation to take into account the dynamic nature of knowledge and nature itself.

12. An auspicious answer from the oracle of nature • But it has likewise been shown, that fashion, mode, ordonnance, are not Method, inasmuch as all Method supposes A PRINCIPLE OF UNITY WITHPROGRESSION; in other words, progressive transition without breach of continuity. But such a principle, it has been proved, can never in the sciences of experiment or in those of observation be adequately supplied by a theory built on generalization. For what shall determine the mind to abstract and generalize one common point rather than another? and within what limits, from what number of individual objects, shall the generalization be made? • But in experimental philosophy, it may be said how much do we not owe to accident? Doubtless: but let it not be forgotten, that if the discoveries so made stop there; if they do not excite some master IDEA; if they do not lead to some LAW (in whatever dress of theory or hypotheses the fashions and prejudices of the time may disguise or disfigure it): the discoveries may remain for ages limited in their uses, insecure and unproductive. How many centuries, we might have said millennia, have passed, since the first accidental discovery of the attraction and repulsion of light bodies by rubbed amber, &c. Compare the interval with the progress made within less than a century, after the discovery of the pheno­mena that led immediately to a THEORY of electricity. • The naturalist, who cannot or will not see, that one fact is often worth a thousand as including them all in itself, and that it first makes all the others facts; who has not the head to comprehend, the soul to reverence, a central experiment or observation (what the Greeks would per­haps have called a protophaenomon); will never receive an auspi­cious answer from the oracle of nature. • .

13. The presence of an IDEA • EINSTEIN • From Schlipp, p. I-7: • “What, precisely, is ‘thinking’? When, at the reception of sense-impressions, memory-pictures emerge, this is not yet ‘thinking.’ And when such pictures form series, each member of which calls forth another, this too is not yet ‘thinking.’ When, however, a certain picture turns up in many such series, then—precisely through such return—it becomes an ordering element for such series, in that it connects series which in themselves are unconnected. Such an element becomes an instrument, a concept (Begriff).[note that this is Coleridge’s Idea, since it cannot be a concept of stuff which always entails that the members of the series are connected through the categories-LS] I think that the transition from free association or ‘dreaming’ to thinking is characterized by the more or less dominating role which the [Begriff] plays in it. It is by no means necessary that the [Begriff]must be connected with a sensorily cognizable and reproducible sign(word); but when this is the case thinking becomes by means of that fact communicable.”