Review: What Coleridge Thought

What Coleridge Thought by Owen Barfield
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Apparently, this was written while the philosophical works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge were coming out in new volumes. Who knew the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner/the Hunting of the Snark was a philosopher, too! Apparently, a noted and productive one. So, we get the philosopher's subtlety and the poets metaphor: "“It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse that distinguishes in order to divide.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection)

Coleridge sallies forth to distinguish from the directly perceptible world of natura naturata to explore the "supersensuous" realm of the natura naturans. From these musings he developed a polar logic, apparently refined from the writings of Giordano Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa from the idea of coincidence of opposites. Ultimately, we find Coleridge has affirmed a Christian mysticism that is his worldview. Regardless, of how we take the culmination, the journey sparkles with such observations as, "The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very characteristic. With more adverbs there would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made them." (Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: And the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel)

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