People sometimes have the impression that philosophy is about reasoning, methods of reasoning, the process of reasoning, logic. I disagree. I’ve argued that a philosopher discovers new ideas through intuition, not through reasoning. The word “intuition” comes from the Latin tueri, to see. Intuition enables the philosopher to see an idea, to see a facet of reality, to see a pattern in the world, to see a law of nature.
A philosopher’s “audience” will agree with him if they see what he sees, if their experience is consistent with the philosopher’s idea. A philosopher’s audience won’t be persuaded by elaborate reasoning, they know that reasoning can be used to prove anything, as a lawyer can argue either side of a case.
What if a philosopher is discussing moral and religious issues, rather than setting forth a new law of nature, a new theory of reality? A philosopher’s view of moral and religious issues is often shaped by his needs, his psychological needs. Sometimes a philosopher uses elaborate reasoning to justify views that are based on his psychological needs. Sometimes a philosopher candidly admits that he needs a particular belief. Kierkegaard said, “The postulate [of God] is a necessary act of self-preservation.”1 Coleridge also admitted that he believed what he needed to believe, not what reasoning made him think was true. Coleridge said, “There is an original corruption in our nature, from which... we may be redeemed by Christ.... And this I believe, not because I understand it, but because I feel that it is... needful for my nature.”2
Philosophy is more about rhetoric and reputation than reasoning and logic. The philosopher writes out of his own experience, and appeals to the experience of the reader. The philosopher discovers a new idea by intuition, by seeing it, then he describes it for the reader, so the reader can see it.
Coleridge felt that the choice between philosophies, the choice between the organic and the mechanical worldview, was a matter of preference; “Coleridge asserts that the primitive element of a philosophy, its founding intuition, must be adopted, not by force of evidence, but an act of ‘the will.’” Philosophy appeals to the heart as well as the head. Philosophy moves the world because it appeals to the whole person, and affects the whole person.
M. H. Abrams (“Mike” to his friends) was a prominent literary critic and an English professor at Cornell. Abrams died in 2015 at age 102. Among his students at Cornell were Harold Bloom and Thomas Pynchon.
Abrams’ father was an Orthodox Jew who made a living as a house painter. Like Bloom, Abrams spoke Yiddish before he spoke English. As an undergrad at Harvard, Abrams was advised that a Jew couldn’t become an English professor. But he was encouraged that Lionel Trilling became an English professor at Columbia before World War II, and after the war, anti-Semitism was in retreat because of its association with Nazism. Many soldiers returning from the war went to college, so there was a demand for English professors. What had seemed like a hopeless career path suddenly looked promising. Abrams’ parents must have breathed a sigh of relief.
Abrams chose to study the Romantics, though T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism had panned them. Abrams may have inspired his students to focus on the Romantics (Harold Bloom focused on the Romantics in his early work). Abrams’ first book was The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953); this is the work for which he’s best known. Owen Barfield says, “The Mirror and the Lamp is a book for which I have an almost unbounded admiration; it is a sort of paradigm for me of what such a book should be, and one which I have no hope of nearing myself.”3 Another scholar called it, “one of the most important books ever written about English literature.”
In The Mirror and the Lamp, Abrams argued that “Classical literature was a mirror, reflecting the world; Romantic and modern literature is a lamp, shining forth from the soul of the artist,” revealing as much about the artist as it reveals about the world. In other words, Classical literature is usually objective, Romantic and modern literature usually subjective.
Abrams argued that the Romantic poet tried to re-beautify the world, re-glorify the world, after Newton & Company had depicted the world as a cold, heartless machine. “At a storied dinner in 1817, the Romantic writers John Keats and Charles Lamb drank a toast of ‘confusion to mathematics,’ agreeing that Newton ‘had destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors.’”
Abrams also wrote Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. In this book, he argued that religious images, Biblical archetypes, have influenced modern literature.
Abrams argues that there were two Coleridges: the young Coleridge, rational and radical, and the mature Coleridge, mystical and conservative. These two Coleridges were separated by a spiritual crisis, a crisis that ended with a conversion experience. Coleridge tells the story of his crisis and conversion in Biographia Literaria, which Abrams calls a “crisis-autobiography.” Coleridge’s major philosophical works were written after his conversion, “during a four-year span beginning in 1815.”4
The young Coleridge adhered to Hartley’s mechanical psychology, Hartley’s Newtonian psychology. Hartley’s view was deterministic; Hartley viewed the mind as “the passive recipient of the impact of particles which it converts into images of sensation.”5 Hartley viewed the mind as a pool table, as Newton viewed the cosmos as a pool table. If Newton could explain the cosmos as a machine, why not explain the human mind as a machine? For Coleridge, breaking with Hartley was the first step toward building his own philosophy. Coleridge replaced Hartley’s “machine-mind” with a mind that was active and creative, as I’ve tried to replace evolution-by-random-mutation with an evolution that’s active and creative. Coleridge believed that the foundation of a philosophy was a theory of mind.
The mature Coleridge was influenced by the German philosopher Schelling, but he felt that Schelling had fallen into pantheism, and he thought he could rescue Schelling’s philosophy from pantheism.6 He admired Schelling’s philosophy of nature because it viewed nature as “vital,” “dynamic,” “constructive.”7 This dynamism is evident in inorganic matter, in plants and animals, and even at the apex of creation, the human mind. The same dynamism runs through everything. The human mind isn’t merely similar to a growing plant, it’s the very same thing; the mind’s dynamism is the very same thing as the plant’s dynamism. (If this sounds odd, consider that we’re related to the plant, we’re distant cousins of the plant, we share a common ancestor, namely, the first spark of life, the first living cell. We can take a similar view of the dynamism of matter: we’re related to matter, our distant ancestor is the first spark of life, and that first spark came from matter, so we came from matter. The world is one, unus mundus.)
Everywhere we see “inherent energies,” not just Newton’s “material particles and motion.”8 Newton gave us “the stark image of a machine-universe whose ultimate elements are indivisible particles of matter capable of being set in motion.”9 Newton had written, “It seems probable to me, that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles.”10 Newton makes the universe seem like a pool table. We now know that atoms/particles aren’t as solid as Newton thought, and we know that matter is another form of energy, so the advance of knowledge has strengthened Coleridge’s argument.
Coleridge brought to life Newton’s dead universe, Newton’s lifeless matter. The mature Coleridge rejoiced that the world was an organic whole, and man was part of the whole. The mature Coleridge spoke of, “that intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves, as one with the whole.... It is an eternal and infinite self-rejoicing, self-loving, with a joy unfathomable, with a love all comprehensive.”11 This ecstatic vision of wholeness contrasts with the Newtonian-materialistic vision, where “we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life. This is abstract knowledge, or the science of the mere understanding.”12
Coleridge’s goal was to overcome the mechanical worldview that had arisen around 1660, and to lead his society to a healthier worldview. The mechanical worldview was having a wide and harmful influence, corrupting not only thought but action. Around 1815, Coleridge wrote, “The histories and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy.”12B
The Western-scientific worldview that arose around 1660 sees space, time, and causality in a linear way. The past is a long chain of cause-and-effect. The opposite worldview — which might be called the Chinese or Jungian or holistic worldview — sees clusters rather than linear chains. This Jungian view sees things happening simultaneously, not before-and-after; Jung’s term for simultaneous happenings is “synchronicity.”
In the Paired Particles experiment, we see things happening simultaneously, happening by virtue of relationship/linkage/cluster, not by virtue of a causal chain. The relationship between paired particles survives over any distance, as if space were unimportant, as if the billiard balls on one pool table could affect those on another pool table, without any physical link, any causal link. One Jungian, Marie-Louise von Franz, spoke of, “the attitude of the Chinese, whose theories of medicine, philosophy, and even building are based on a ‘science’ of meaningful coincidences. The classical Chinese texts did not ask what causes what, but rather what ‘likes’ to occur with what.”
According to Abrams, Coleridge’s goal was “replacing the causal relations of the post-Newtonian world scheme with the primitive imaginative categories of analogy, correspondence, participation and identity.”13 Coleridge said that time “presents itself... as an infinite ascent of Causes... an interminable progression of Effects,” but when “freed from the phenomena of Time and Space,” the world reveals itself as “the actual immanence of ALL in EACH.”14 The paired particles are, so to speak, in each other, though separated by thousands of miles. The future exists already, and can often be anticipated. Things seem to be separated in space and time, but they’re actually bound up together, clustered together.
The “togetherness” of Coleridge’s thought makes the world one, connects us to nature, makes us at home in the world. The togetherness of Coleridge’s thought appeals to the heart as well as the head. Coleridge wrote, “A metaphysical solution, that does not instantly tell for something in the Heart, is grievously to be suspected as apocryphal.”15
So why did Newton’s system make many converts, and why do mechanical/materialistic theories still make converts today? Perhaps because the mind shrinks back from mystery, from the intangible, and prefers a worldview that’s clear and logical, even if it’s cold and heartless. People want to use only the lower functions of the mind, which Coleridge called the understanding and the senses, and leave the higher functions unused.
Oft alone,
Piercing the long-neglected holy cave,
The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,
He bade with lifted torch its starry walls
Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame
Of odorous lamps tended by saint and sage.
Should Israel enter the Gaza tunnels, and try to wipe out Hamas? It could be argued that Hamas is an idea, and you can’t kill an idea. In a recent column, Thomas Friedman says that Israel should heed the example of India, which resisted the temptation to strike back in 2008, when Pakistani terrorists killed more than 160 people in India.
In an earlier issue, I mentioned a Buddhist legend in which 20,000 devils, armed to the teeth, came to battle the Buddha, but the Buddha wasn’t there. Marie-Louise von Franz writes, “This introverted way of not fighting evil or getting involved in its emotional or other effects, but of simply stepping back into the inner emptiness of the Self has become in the East a conscious collective teaching.”
A former Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, advocates a long siege, rather than a headlong attack.16 Bennett writes, “Do not allow any drop of fuel to enter the [Gaza Strip]. Without fuel there are no tunnels because there is no ventilation and no lighting.” A long siege might demoralize Hamas fighters; it would test their patience, rather than testing their fighting spirit.
In an earlier issue, I described how Julius Caesar used inaction against the tribes in what is now northern France and Belgium:
| In 57 BC, the Belgae formed a coalition to confront Caesar. Caesar met this threat with “masterly inaction”: he realized that the large Gallic army had an inadequate supply system, so he simply waited for them to run out of food. When they began retreating, he pursued them relentlessly and “in a lightning campaign reduced the greater part of what is now northern France.” |
As Caesar saw a weakness in his foes’ food supply, so Naftali Bennett sees a weakness in Hamas’ fuel supply. Both plans (Caesar’s and Bennett’s) utilize what Bennett calls “strategic patience.” But does the Israeli population have enough patience for a siege that could last years? Do Israel’s supporters, such as the U.S., have enough patience? Can Israel defy world opinion for a prolonged period? Is Israel willing to risk uprisings in countries like Jordan and Egypt?
I saw the popular movie Past Lives (2023). It was written and directed by Korean-Canadian-American Celine Song. Wikipedia says, “The plot is semi-autobiographical and inspired by real events from Song’s life.” I enjoyed the film; the plot is charming, believable, and easy to follow; one can connect with the characters and “suspend one’s disbelief” (to borrow a phrase from Coleridge). But sometimes Past Lives wallows in emotion, it goes into Slow Motion to focus on feelings. The theme of reincarnation, apparent in the title Past Lives, is not believable, and detracts from the film; it’s clearly a plot device that the writer herself doesn’t really believe in. Intellectually and psychologically, Past Lives is rather thin.
© L. James Hammond 2023
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | Kierkegaard, by Walter Lowrie, IV, 1 back |
| 2. | Coleridge’s Variety, edited by John Beer, Ch. 6, “Coleridge’s Anxiety,” by Thomas McFarland, p. 134, footnote back |
| 3. | What Coleridge Thought, p. 210 back |
| 4. | Coleridge’s Variety: Bicentenary Studies, edited by John Beer, Ch. 5, “Coleridge and the Romantic Vision of the World,” by M. H. Abrams, p. 115 back |
| 5. | “Coleridge and the Romantic Vision of the World,” p. 119. Hartley even brought in ether to explain mental associations, as Newton had used ether to explain gravitation.(See Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, p. 422, footnote 9, and p. 423) back |
| 6. | “Coleridge and the Romantic Vision of the World,” p. 122 back |
| 7. | This is similar to my view of evolution, while the Hartley/Newton philosophy is similar to the materialistic Darwinism of The Establishment. back |
| 8. | “Coleridge and the Romantic Vision of the World,” p. 119 back |
| 9. | “Coleridge and the Romantic Vision of the World,” p. 117 back |
| 10. | “Coleridge and the Romantic Vision of the World,” p. 118, quoting Newton’s Opticks. I quoted this passage in an earlier issue. back |
| 11. | “Coleridge and the Romantic Vision of the World,” p. 112, quoting Coleridge’s The Friend. Coleridge felt that Newton’s pool table was a useful “fiction of science,” but not a “truth of fact.”(Coleridge’s Variety, p. 118) Newton should have been content to be an experimental physicist, and should have kept his resolution to avoid framing hypotheses, but instead he became a “speculative thinker” who put forward a “metaphysical worldview.”(ibid, p. 117) back |
| 12. | ibid back |
| 12B. | The Statesman’s Manual (in Shedd’s edition of Coleridge’s Complete Works in 7 volumes, published 1884, Vol. 1, p. 436), quoted in Barfield, p. 112 back |
| 13. | “Coleridge and the Romantic Vision of the World,” p. 125 back |
| 14. | “Coleridge and the Romantic Vision of the World,” p. 125, quoting Coleridge’s Statesman’s Manual, sometimes called Lay Sermon back |
| 15. | “Coleridge and the Romantic Vision of the World,” p. 124 back |
| 16. | For more info about Bennett’s plan, click here, here, or here. back |